Good morning!

Enjoy a lunchtime read of some links about women making art and being a part of a diaspora.

I’m currently reading Nadifa Mohamed’s Orchard of Lost Souls, and it’s great! She was the starting point for this week’s theme. I love the way she talks about the cities of Somalia here – makes them seem beautiful and magical and weird, like the cities in Invisible Cities. Enjoy this interview and I highly recommend her book as well:

But Mohamed speaks of Hargeisa with great affection, as a place in which she feels safer than in London. Indeed, Hargeisa is famous for its safe streets and low level of crime – money changers sit fearlessly behind huge piles of notes unprotected on the roadside and a gold market casually operates in the middle of town: “these feel like secrets, like secrets only people from those places know.”

http://africanarguments.org/2013/11/01/an-interview-with-nadifa-mohamed-i-dont-feel-bound-by-somaliabut-the-stories-that-have-really-motivated-me-are-from-there-by-magnus-taylor/

Here’s an interview with Min Jin Lee about home, cities and diaspora life. As someone who has not moved a lot, I love to read stories of people who have, and the ways they find of fitting in and making their new locations fit them:

In cities, I get to have both the nearness of many people and a kind of particular privacy found only in crowds. I was born in Seoul and have lived in New York, New Haven, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo. I feel the pull of suburbs and rural areas, too, but I feel most at home in cities.

https://chireviewofbooks.com/2016/05/12/bea-16-why-min-jin-lees-new-novel-took-30-years-to-write/

Finally, some visual arts for you – here’s susan pui san lok’s work for the Venice Biennale’s Diaspora Pavillon. I promise I tried very hard to find an interview with her, but there was nothing about this piece which is the one I want to show you:

The opening gambit of the show is to make the visitor enter through the glorious golden foil curtains of a work by susan pui san lok.  Her sound piece, formed of extracts from songs all with the word ‘gold’ plays you in and instantly everything else you have seen that day is forgotten.

http://www.contemporaryartsociety.org/news/friday-dispatch-news/diaspora-pavilion-venice-biennale/

Cheers,

Alex.