Sebastian Maseri
Pedagogies of Site Fellowship | Field Notes
The work I do exists within a space where the effects are shaped by the relations between time, language, location, objects, and the space itself.
At one moment, there is one place, and then, there is another. Yet, the moment of change—and what happens in between—becomes lost. These places are embedded in memory, though they are entirely different from the reality in which they were lived.
These dislocated memories reside within me, creating conflicts in my understanding of my surroundings. The process of translating an experience into a memory is, to say the least, complicated.
I question physical space through a screen, and through drawing on paper, I contain these moments without the intent to resolve them. The cycle that my work goes through creates a consistent structure, allowing me to focus on a specific place, situation, or moment. The work draws on lived experiences as an entry point, and within its inherent incompleteness and visual contradictions, a displacement emerges. I am interested in dislocated memory, not only for the sensation it creates but also for the change that arises from such dislocation.
This active awareness of layered significance shapes my work and the way it claims what is real. Today, the tools for memory rely on the immediacy of screens and pages—whether in the form of printed photos or videos. This immediacy enables quicker and more intense projections onto memories, generating a new type of dislocation.
Through my alterations of situations, places, and objects, my work invents and suggests new physical relationships to spaces and things, exploring how they change over time.
Creating interventions in space causes a physical disjunction. These interventions give me agency for a moment of pause. This process of alteration directly relates to how memory becomes dislocated—location holds a trace and reveals itself through change.
Field Notes from the Fellows share provisional mappings, poetic fragments, visual fieldnotes, and digital captures generated by participants of the Pedagogies of Site Fellowship ahead of their culminating event on June 7, 2025 at Dia Chelsea. To learn more about the program and event, please visit the Dia website.