currently, I am...

On a residency at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst Wien, as part of the Art Schools Alliance program.

I'm here to research my family history in Vienna, primarily focussing on the period when my great-grandfather (who was a CIA operative) was stationed here between 1948 and 1950. My grandfather and his siblings have memories of the city from their childhood, and I am trying to intuitively research their experience through anecdotes that they have passed down to me. My mother is of Russian heritage, so I am especially interested in the early cold war dynamic, and the fact that Vienna was partitioned into separate Russian and American zones. I'm also intrigued by the mechanisms by which ideology became incorporated into culture and self-understanding, and what lies at the root of these narratives (between individualism and collectivism).

I am currently using a character, Wendy Red, to explore these ideas. We will have the ASA show in the Schillerplatz building at the end of April, and I am developing a performance in which Wendy will antagonise the audience to communicate ideas around what truly makes us different from eachother (and how we communicate this difference).

Below are some preliminary ideas i'm exploring. The text is taken from my grandfather's only voice acting role, recorded in Vienna in 1961, and the font is fraktur, the old German script. He spent a summer translating letters written from German scientists trapped in the Soviet Union for the CIA, and described his difficulty at decoding the fraktur, which is the script they were taught to write in school.