While researching an idea I was having for the Kinross scholarship (which unfortunately I did not get) I found piece on a contemporary photography exhibition happening in the city of Florence. My aim for the application was to discuss Florence’s mass expansion of mechanical design and production, and little known to the tourist trade.

(Extract)

“I believe that Florence is the perfect location for the continuation of this project. This is because today a new signature market is emerging in Florence, bubbling beneath an art and architectural heritage. This market is the machine. The machine manufacturing industry is the fastest growing market in the city, the only one to see a rise since the recession (according to one report a rise of 50.1 billion Euros). It has turned Florence into a city of two halves. The public perception of its historical artistic identity is fast becoming separated from its actual identity as a global industrial manufacturing centre. I am very interested in how a city deals with such an extreme personality split. Is Florence’s contemporary art scene examining this new economic identity or masking it in nostalgia for its past?”

The descriptions for this exhibition, no images attached, random words found by default, held certain potency for me. The exhibition seemed to be about artists coming out of the ‘end of transmission period’; the fifteen year gap post the enormous geo-political space that was the USSR. It talks about multi-dimensionality in a world we assumed to be 2D for so long and the need to retain links to a past fast retreating from the present. It throws up issues to do with trauma of being thrown into the global world, freedom, and the conditions that come with it. I took some of these ideas for my application. This must, for now, remain as a proposal with, on this occasion, just a slight delay on the execution time.

(2^nd extract)

“The multi-dimensional nature of a city, so embracing of technology and a new global market, is moving away from its historical past so fast that I believe there is a vital space here for young artists to research this past and future and document the schism before points of connection can no longer be traced. One term that I found applied to the work of artists trying to pick their way through this treacherous terrain is ‘progressive nostalgia’. As artists we have the privileged position of being able to pick indiscriminately from past, future, fact, fiction, history, science, philosophy and our own opinions. Travel, movement, labour, globalisation are all words that I see pop up time and time again in contemporary art practice however the imprint of the past is often left forgotten. Florence, the city of extremes, an industrial core hiding inside an art historical tourist industry, is a perfect location for directing this area of study.”