Slupsk

I have never been to Slupsk. But I read the papers. I have my snatches of geography and history, my dreams and prejudices. AND I’ve got all the photographs. So of course I know what it’s like. What an amazing place.... The performance took the form of a talk and Power Point talk-and-image presentation, ostensibly about the city of Slupsk in Poland. It was in fact a humorous inquiry into the ways in which my/our general ignorance of other countries opens up space for a strange mix of bigotry and romantic fantasy. How can we do other than locating new experiences in terms of previous ones and interpreting the ‘foreign’ in relationship to home? All the images of ‘Slupsk’ were taken in within a few minutes walk of the gallery in Carlisle.