Dani Marti
Missing Spain
Artist Dani Marti is currently working inside the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in the process of creating his new work Missing Spain. The title of the work is a literal indicator of the meaning as Marti says “I’ve been living in Australia for the last 12 years. Travelling often back and forward between Barcelona and Sydney. Each time I travel to Spain, Sydney becomes a blurry reality.
Many times I concentrate and try to remember my life, my friends and my family in Spain, but it becomes an impossible exercise, images become foggy and evaporate in space.
” For some time I’ve been thinking of how to materialize that reality through my art practice. Missing Spain hangs in space, and works with the space and the light.” The work is made of thousands of street reflectors in red and white. This particular material is representative of Dani Marti’s continuing practise using materials from the everyday. Evocative of his earlier weavings the reflectors are used in the same repetitive pattern, the methodical process of building the pattern, a vital part of the work.
Missing Spain will be suspended from the upper level of the industrial interior of the Casula Powerhouse, a distance of up to 9metres.
He continues “The work is hanging in between spaces, in between two realities not representing one reality or particular images. It’s like an emotional state. Neither fully present, nor fully absent.”
Missing Spain, pays tribute to that split sense of belonging and not belonging to a particular country or state of being. He claims” there is not sadness, there is joy. I live in Barcelona, I live in Sydney.”
Missing Spain 14 June – 12 August 2001 Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre
Media Contact: Madeleine Kelman Audience & Media Manager 9824 1121
kelman@casulapowerhouse.com