The Solastalgic Archive

Solastalgia is a premonition of longing for the present moment from the perspective of an anticipated future. It is the feeling of homesickness before leaving home. What are we experiencing now that we will miss in the future? -- that is the sensation of solastalgia. 

The Solastalgic Archive holds ephemera of memory, creation, forgetting, destruction, preciousness and transience. Contributions have been sourced from a vast array of people, each asked to consider what connects them to time. Unlike other museum collections, the Solastalgic Archive holds deeply personal items as well as things that change or disappear over time. 

By allowing emotions and ephemerality to displace institutional indifference and contrived permanence, this space enlivens the passage of time. The Archive will evolve over the course of the exhibition and will continue to grow through classroom activities and public workshops.

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Artist Bio:

Artist and researcher Nina Elder creates projects that reveal humanity’s dependence on and interruption of the natural world. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists and diverse communities. Her work takes many forms, including drawings, performance, pedagogy, critical writing, long term community-based projects, and public art.

Recent solo exhibitions of Nina’s work have been organized by SITE Santa Fe, Indianapolis Contemporary, and university museums across the US. Her work has been featured in Art in America, VICE Magazine, and on PBS; her writing has been published in American Scientist and Edge Effects Journal. Nina’s research has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Nina is an affiliate artist of the National Performance Network. She has recently held research positions at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, the Anchorage Museum, and the Art and Ecology Program at the University of New Mexico. In between her travels and projects, Nina lives alone on a volcano in New Mexico.

About the CCAC Artist Residency:

Hosted by the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA for the autumn of 2023, Nina Elder will be a nurturing presence that fosters collective, creative, and interdisciplinary research, exploring how we situate ourselves within time.

Working with sympathetic faculty, Nina has designed embedded assignments into class syllabi that compliment course materials, accentuate learning goals, and encourage students to contribute new forms to Nina's ongoing national project called the Solastalgic Archive. Collaborative discussions and creative experiments will explore new ways of understanding time, living through loss, the changing role of museums, and finding meaning in the unknowability of the future. 

Warm gratitude to all of these faculty and their courses for making this programming possible:

Sloane McNulty (Ecology and Capitalism)
Kate McCallum (Research for a Creative Practice)
Taylor Eggan (AC+D Practicum)
Robert Ryan (Society and Culture: Native American Cultural Practices)
Mollie Nouwen (Research for a Creative Practice)
 

During her stay, Nina will also be collaborating at the Watershed Print Center at PNCA – lead by Matthew Letzelter with assistance from MFA in Print Media candidates – to create an edition of prints as well as a zine publication with the help of christina martin, MFA in Print Media Alumna '22.

The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture is excited to launch its inaugural Artist-in-Residence program, running from November to December for the 2023 year. The residency will be experimentation and production focused to nurture artist careers and create opportunities which benefit creative and collaborative growth for our artists, PNCA students and community, and beyond.

This residency represents a beginning to a comprehensive approach to help artists realize their creative visions, take risks and experiment and expand pedagogical experience all while ensuring they have resources to advance their skills and careers. The CCAC is thrilled to launch this program in alignment with their mission: to be a platform for cultural production including exhibition, lecture, performance, and publication, throwing open its doors to the greater public to foster conversation and community.
 

For any questions, contact Assistant Director, Hannah Bakken Morris hbakken@willamette.edu