22 november 2022, Flor Linckens
A raft as a metaphor: powerful yet fragile
Until 17 December, andriesse eyck gallery in Amsterdam will show a remarkable video artwork by Rory Pilgrim, who won a prestigious Prix de Rome in 2019. Central to his research projects is the motto 'the personal is political'.
The British artist offers a platform to diverse communities and voices. He is interested in the ways in which we come together and want to effect social change, both on an individual and collective level. Our personal relationship to nature and climate change often plays a direct or indirect role in this. Pilgrim will speak to climate activists and learns that many people looked to nature as their greatest source of comfort during the pandemic. The artist works in various media that are often mixed in his practice: from music, film and text to drawing and performance.
In his research project "RAFTS", Pilgrim centers a powerful yet fragile symbol that has existed for millennia: the raft. It has various connotations for the artist, as a symbol of physical survival on open water (for refugees, for example), of stories from the Old Testament and as a metaphor for the protected atmosphere of the earth itself, our safe haven that itself 'floats' in a continuously expanding universe. What keeps us afloat during periods of rapid and major change and uncertainty—and the hopelessness and depression that accompany them? In the midst of the pandemic, the artist asked a group of residents from the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham. Their stories testify to their resilience and will to survive.
With "RAFTS", commissioned by Serpentine Gallery, Pilgrim made a concert broadcast of intimate stories, poetry, dance, animation and music, inspired by the BBC's Radio Ballads radio documentaries from the 1950s and 1960s. Pilgrim films his characters up close and talks with them about topics such as home, mental health, recovery, work and our environment. Which rafts will we need to navigate the future? The artist has collaborated on this project with, among others, a mental health arts charity in London and the London Contemporary Orchestra.
In his previous work “The Undercurrent” from 2019 — which won him the Prix de Rome — Pilgrim showed a group of young climate activists and homeless people from the city of Boise in Idaho in the United States. In the conversations the artist entered into, their personal concerns and problems also emerged. Pilgrim teamed up with the homeless project Project Well Being for this piece, a collaboration he continued through Zoom for “RAFTS.” His latest project is a continuation of "The Undercurrent" in several ways, but on an even more intimate scale. The pandemic has made many people's worlds smaller and that is reflected in "RAFTS".
In addition to the video work, the exhibition in andriesse eyck galerie also includes a series of paintings and drawings, for which Pilgrim used materials including pencil, chalk, nail polish, glitter and oil paint. Also on display are some artwork by Eddie Paggett and Mark Jones, two of the participants he interviewed.
Pilgrim's work has previously been shown at the MoMA, Serpentine Galleries, Centre Pompidou, the Badischer Kunstverein, South London Gallery, the Glasgow Film Festival and the Images Festival in Toronto, among others.
