Now I am at Philadelphia airport transferring flights from Barcelona to Albany. I came back from Can Serrat an artist in residence program in Barcelona and now starting Millay Colony in NY.
Can Serrat was a wonderful place, probably the best place for the quality of meals among all the residency programs I had experienced. One month was not enough at all to pursue my ambitious project and to enjoy innumerable exciting places in Barcelona. I am pretty sure that I will come back to Barcelona to continue my project and explore more of Catalonian culture.
Here is a little description of what I was working on at Can Serrat.
I wanted to do an activity which represents how I encounter the people in El Bruc. One of my favorite musician Pau Casals was from Catalonia and he always ended his concert with this song “El Cant dels Ocells (the song of the bird)” which seems to be a symbol of their identity surviving through the history of struggle. Encountering a foreigner is like mirroring one’s self. Through meeting someone from outside, we become conscious of who we are. So, I asked people in El Bruc to listen to Pau Casals’s “El Cant dels Ocells” and experience it and, if they like, to sing with it. The title of the project “Peace! Peace! Peace!” is from Pau Casals’s speech at an UN conference, describing how the birds in Catalonia sing in the air. I also learned the song my self. So I went to some spaces in El Bruc with the guitar, and whistle the melody, and sometimes asked people to teach me difficult pronunciations of Catalan lyrics of the song.
<—a day has passed—>
Here I have arrived at Millay Colony after spending a night at a motel close to the airport which made me a bit sad because it was not in Barcelona anymore not only geographically but also conceptually or culturally. At the airport/airplanes, and there at a model, I got totally deprived of good food, good time, beautiful people, etc. Well, thought, here I am. My residency at Millay Colony has started. I have, at this point, very strange feeling of not being catch up with the change. Here are some pics.
