Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
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Silence Awareness Existence program / FEBRUARY <strong>2020</strong><br />
Maria Takolander<br />
Australia<br />
www.mariatakolander.com<br />
About<br />
Maria Takolander was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1973<br />
to Finnish parents. She is a fiction writer, poet, essayist,<br />
reviewer, scholar and interviewer. She is the author of two<br />
books of poetry, The End of the World (Giramondo 2014)<br />
and Ghostly Subjects (Salt 2009), with a third, Trigger<br />
Warning, forthcoming with UQP. Her poems were selected<br />
for The Best Australian Poems and/or The Best Australian<br />
Poetry every year from 2005, and are anthologised in<br />
Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (2009),<br />
Thirty Australian Poets (2011), the Turnrow Anthology of<br />
Contemporary Australian Poetry (2014), Contemporary<br />
Australian Poetry (2016) and #MeToo: Stories from the<br />
Australian Movement (2019). Her poems are also represented<br />
internationally in special Australian-poetry issues of Agenda<br />
(UK), Chicago Quarterly Review (US), Kenyon Review (US),<br />
Lichtungen (Austria) and Michigan Quarterly Review (US).<br />
Radio National Australia aired a program about her poetry<br />
in 2015, and she has performed her poetry on TV and at the<br />
2017 International Poetry Festival of Medellín, Colombia.<br />
Maria is also a prize-winning fiction writer and the author of<br />
The Double (and Other Stories) (Text 2013), which was named<br />
one of the best books of the year by The Australian and other<br />
forums. Maria is now finishing a novel about climate change,<br />
the most urgent issue of our time.<br />
A cli-fi novel<br />
When I left Australia, the country was in the grip of an<br />
unprecedented environmental crisis, with an area twice<br />
the size of Belgium having been burnt by bushfires after<br />
years of record-breaking heat. Sydney, Melbourne and<br />
Canberra were blanketed by hazardous smoke for weeks<br />
on end, making life in the major cities as catastrophic as<br />
life in the bush. I arrived in Finland in February, in the last<br />
month of the northern winter, when the land should have<br />
been blanketed by snow and the lakes frozen. Instead, cars<br />
were stirring up dust as they passed down country roads,<br />
and lakes were slushy and unstable. My grief and anxiety<br />
were profound. So too, though, was my sense of the aching<br />
beauty of the world. Each day, from my studio window in<br />
the ‘yellow house’ at <strong>Arteles</strong> Creative Centre in Haukijärvi,<br />
I observed an environment that presented to me subtle but<br />
nevertheless exquisite variations of sky and water and land.<br />
As the sun moved along the horizon, casting its gradations<br />
and patterns of light and shade, these silent visions of the<br />
world moved through me, setting the pace and mood of my<br />
days. My month at <strong>Arteles</strong> was an extraordinarily nourishing<br />
and generative one. I couldn’t think of a better place from<br />
which to have worked on my cli-fi novel.