An overheard conversation

This conversation took place as part of the Thinkers in Residence Project, looking at the work of Tobias Zeilony. Click HERE to see the images.  Thinker 1: “What I was thinking about a lot was the feeling of displacement - the sort of this sense of being in the wrong place at the wrong time…there’s a lot of thoughts about being uncomfortable in the place you find yourself to be..… A sense that as a person you’re in a particular place at a particular time and actually the path that history took is not the one you backed. You’re actually belonging to another world, another place, a different path…The point at which you are most yourself and the place where your life was most real is not the place you have ended up.”  Thinker 2: “Oh my god, listen to you! That’s so profound, isn't it”  Thinker 1: “Yeah, well I’m full of cold medication”  Thinker 3: “Oh, thats what you call it!”  Thinker 2: “My view of this body of work about migrants has changed profoundly. Its the only piece of work that left me really cold. There was all this moralising going on in my head….I found it hard to relate to the images and then this Greek bloke pointed out to me that the layout of the pictures is just a newspaper but just the story hasn't been told….you’re so used to being manipulated and pushed into a moral position about how do I relate to these people and so this space did unnerve me actually….”  Thinker 1: “It depends on the extent to which you feel yourself to be an outsider…that sense of things not conforming around you. ”  Thinker 3 “We were talking about the discomfort of nations…when people do the right thing like Germany and Sweden with the refugee population and having to live with that not being comfortable because its suddenly bringing to the fore all the things in the society that you want to keep down. Its like being in therapy, all this crap comes to the surface and you think, I didn't really want to feel this, could somebody just turn it off.”  Click HERE to listen to the full conversation.  Click HERE to read and listen to the conversations in the project archive.