Maria Amidu looks at longing in new Eastbourne exhibition

SussexWorld

Maria Amidu looks at longing in a new exhibition at Towner Eastbourne running until September 8.

Transcript

00:00 Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspaper. It's lovely

00:06 this morning to speak to Maria Amidou, who has a fascinating sounding exhibition currently

00:11 at Towne at Eastbourne, running until the 8th of September. And I'm going to have to

00:17 look at the name. 26,778,780 minutes is the title, which instantly begs the question,

00:27 what does that convey? Well, it conveys a sense of longing, a real longing, a time period

00:35 of longing, which is essentially part of the commission piece, which is called 26,778,780

00:43 minutes. The title of the exhibition is in the perpetual back and forth, there's two

00:49 works in the show. So they're both about what's not there, or what's both works. The second

00:57 work is called Episodes. And so one is about care, and one is about carelessness. And the

01:03 commissioned work is very much about absence, and how we grapple with absence, and how we

01:15 try to explain it, I guess, how we manage that kind of that dissonant sense that we

01:20 have when something's not there, something's missing, something's gone.

01:24 Matthew 14:00 Yeah, and you were talking about just now,

01:27 unretrievable memories. Why do you persist with memories that cannot be retrieved? What's

01:33 the significance there?

01:34 Dr. Anna Butcher 14:07 For me, the significance is because I've been

01:38 in a position where there are things that are no longer retrievable for me. So there

01:43 are people that are no longer around for me to ask about things that I can't remember

01:47 myself. And it's a continuous sense of kind of retrieval. So anybody who has been in a

01:56 position where there's people in their lives that are no longer there knows that the finality

02:00 of that and how it's impossible to, unless there's some, that person's written a book,

02:06 or there's a really comprehensive record, it's really impossible to...

02:10 Matthew 14:42 Well, that makes sense. So not retrievable,

02:12 but that doesn't mean you let go, does it?

02:15 Dr. Anna Butcher 14:49 No, not at all. And actually, I think it's

02:19 probably the complete opposite of not letting go is that you really hold on. I think when

02:25 something is no longer available to you, the longing is kind of exacerbated because of

02:34 that, actually. So I think you kind of tend to hold on even more to the bits that you

02:37 have.

02:38 Matthew 14:59 And that number is an expression of longing.

02:41 It's really interesting what you're saying, that number 26,778,000, blah, blah, blah,

02:46 that equates to 51 years.

02:48 Dr. Anna Butcher 15:06 Yeah.

02:49 Matthew 14:06 But it's so much more powerful when you express

02:51 it as 26 million minutes, isn't it?

02:54 Dr. Anna Butcher 15:12 Yeah, absolutely. Because I think there's

02:56 something about everybody being able to appreciate time in that way. And I think we can, yeah,

03:07 we can be quite, you know, we're always in a rush, aren't we, I think, in contemporary

03:10 life. So I really wanted to pull it right back and get people to slow down and get people

03:15 to really begin to really fully appreciate a time period, an extended time period. And

03:23 by pulling it back to, because I started with years, and then I went to weeks, and then

03:31 days, and then hours, and then minutes. And I did actually also go to seconds.

03:35 Matthew 14:54 Oh, my goodness.

03:36 Dr. Anna Butcher 15:57 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Google did it for me,

03:39 obviously, I didn't do it. But minutes just felt so appropriate, because I think it's

03:47 about kind of, you know, time ticking as well, you know, I think that the metaphor of a clock

03:53 ticking, just, you know, can really pull up so much for anybody, you know.

03:58 Matthew 15:59 Fantastic. Well, it sounds absolutely fascinating.

04:01 And it's 'Till Not Eastbourne' until September the 8th. Really lovely to speak to you, Maria.

04:07 Thank you.

04:08 You're welcome. Thanks for the invitation.

04:11 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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