So the Format blog is here and it will be interesting to see how this takes off, especially as I was the one who decided that I probably wouldn't end up contributing. There are a couple of thoughts from the session from the other night that I wanted to raise.

The residue that I have been left with after a couple of days of digestion, is that of exile.  Farshid's sense of deportment was something that I felt a certain resonance with. It seemed that irrespective of his sense of political and geographical exile, what he was describing was the universal, generalised artist's condition.

Dictionaries are very specific as the their explanation of exile, they talk of expulsion from a country or home. But  'home is a place to which one is attached by myriad habits of thought and behaviour - culturally acquired, of course, yet in time they become so intimately woven into everyday existence that they seem primordial and the essence of one's being' (Tuan, Escapism). I am not going to attempt to unravel the many complexitites of home, but if we consider home as a conscious and subconscious self-construction of habitual thoughts and actions, then surely it is the duty of any artist, of any nationality in any place, to subvert that edifice, firstly for him/her self and consequently for a viewer?

Yet another test!

Well this is a bit of an experiment, so lets see how it goes!

Matt

testing 2

testing again