Follow the Fellow: A Multimedia Art Project

Sun 6 April 2014 - Fri 2 May 2014

Murray Edwards College

Our aim is to shed light on the continuous flow of an almost invisible population in Cambridge: the followers – the ones (mostly women) who come with a partner (the academic fellows) and live there for a month, a year, five years… And go somewhere else for a month, a year, five years… with children raised as global nomads. From post-doc to post-doc or fellowship to fellowship, they just float along a valued professional mobility, in a continuously temporary exile.

The project ‘Follow the Fellow’ started in 2010. It is led by the Austrian writer and performance artist Elke Papp, the French photographer and art historian Genevieve Guetemme and the Finnish photographer and video artist Anna Maija Kesonen. All three are followers themselves and met in Cambridge. Elke Papp followed later her fellow to Southampton and Anna Maija went to the States before following her mathematician husband to London.

Their idea is to offer a creative exploration of the global phenomenon of academic mobility through the eyes of the ones who follow. They tell the stories of the followers with photography, film, text and performance. Just tales of arriving and leaving, of understanding new rules and rituals, of stopping (often involuntarily) personal and professional development or, in some cases, of creating new opportunities and boosting ambitions. The project also shows how artistic practice and creativity are linked to mobility, to the urge to travel, to the need to go beyond the limits – territorial and intellectual ones. It considers the physical and imaginary idea of ‘following’ whilst presenting an intercultural dialogue about place, migration and exile.

Cost: free