Conversation with Phoebe Boswell and Angelica Pesarini

The BSR Podcast

Content Warning: This recording contains mentions of racial trauma, violence against Black and Brown people and racial slurs that can be disturbing or triggering.
The second event of the BSR Fine Arts Talks | Talk Justice series will be a conversation between artist Phoebe Boswell (Bridget Riley Fellow 2019) and Dr Angelica Pesarini (NYU Florence). Pesarini, whose research is dedicated to the analysis of the intersections of race, gender and citizenship in colonial and postcolonial Italy responds to Phoebe's visual essay 'Stranger In The Village', which documents her experience of both an artist residency and a growing consciousness within an increasingly hostile Europe. Combining draftswomanship and digital technology, Boswell creates immersive installations and bodies of work that layer drawing, animation, sound, video and interactivity in an effort to find new languages robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house, centre and amplify voices and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised or sidelined as ‘other’.
Phoebe Boswell explores the sense of ‘belonging’ and is anchored to a restless state of diasporic consciousness, combining traditional drawing with digital technology. Her practice draws on her own experiences of belonging, having been born in Kenya and brought up in the Arabian Gulf; she now lives and works in London. Her works are created in an effort to find new languages robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house, centre and amplify voices and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised or sidelined as ‘other’. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Kristin Hjellegjerde, Carroll / Fletcher, and Tiwani Contemporary; and has screened at the Sundance, BFI London, BlackStar, Underwire and LA Film Festivals, British Animation Awards, and CinemAfrica amongst others. She participated in the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2015, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2016 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva and received the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017, consequently exhibiting as part of the Collateral Events programme at the 57th Venice Biennale. Boswell will unveil a new largescale public moving image work in Geneva in December 2019, and a solo exhibition at New Art Exchange, Nottingham in 2020.
Angelica Pesarini was awarded a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2015 from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds. She is currently a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU Florence where she teaches Black Italia, a course entirely dedicated to the intersectional analysis of racial identity in Italy. Angelica previously worked at Lancaster University as a Lecturer in Gender, Race and Sexuality. Her current work investigates dynamics of race performativity with a focus on colonial and postcolonial Italy and she also works on the racialization of the Italian political discourse on immigration. She has previously conducted research on gender roles and the development of economic activities within some Roma communities in Italy and she has analysed strategies of survival, risks and opportunities associated with male prostitution in Rome. She has been published in a number of journals and edited volumes and she is currently writing a monograph of her first book.