Linen

 In Linen, a site-specific piece specially created for Outside 11, the photographic image has been transferred onto fabric and installed along an outdoors washing line. Family members who live in different countries seem to inhabit the individual cloth items, and by clustering them together a sense of reunion momentarily happens, the disperse diaspora is once more united. Washing is normally something that is experienced as intimate, kept out of the sight of the others. There is even an English saying 'do not wash one's dirty linen in public' which reflects not only nuances of how English people relate to one another but also cultural do's and don'ts.  Social taboos such as this one form a complex and puzzling set of unwritten rules that the immigrant has to negotiate and understand if he is to adapt to the culture he is emigrating to. As an immigrant myself, I had to revise and change cultural habits that once seemed normal in the context of my Spanish latino culture. Linen is an attempt to bring intimacies to the foreground, to highlight the power of visual and sociological statements and to suggest that photography can also be interpreted as a voyeuristic medium that shows what others are not supposed to see. Linen is ultimately an homage to my culture of origin, which had, and always will have, linen flapping about in the sun, for everybody to see.  Marina Velez Vago, July 2011 

The White Hart (sound piece)

Farrago installed this site specific sound piece in leafy Sussex C.F. Art Centre this past summer.
conversations recorded in actual pubs in the area have been digitally distorted and we hear a high pitch dialogue emerging from the little 'pub' as we imagine little local people inside it asking why nobody comes in......

Environmental Issues

Farrago's works for earth:NOW:being

Infiltrating The Nestling Natter

Farrago infiltrates the publication The Nestling Natter in the area of Essex

Farrago also infiltrates the Nestling Natter in local pubs

The Nestling Natter

Farrago at Outside 11: Artist as Outsider

open day at Wysing

Farrago is a group of artists that work collaboratively and whose work tends to explore areas such as identity, social construction, language and ideology. Two of Farrago's artists, Marina Velez and Russell Cuthbert, have merged their cultural backgrounds of origin to create The White Hart.
This mixed media work installation hopes to explore the realities in rural regressive Britain as seen through the eyes of an outsider. In this piece Marina and Russell have revisited the country public house in the idyllic and completely fabricated village of Nestling. Not all is well in the village, which has been rocked by the planning proposal for an Anaerobic Digester factory to be built on the nearby Nestling airfield. Its only surviving pub, The White Hart, is also, much like the fauna that strives to survive in the surroundings, under threat of extinction. The pub is now owned by the merciless 'Corporate Sludge' brewery, which is completely profit driven and not helping out. The pub faces a dilemma: to change and adapt to the times or to die. The inhabitants of Nestling share with us their issues and preoccupations covering topics such as fox hunting and tobacco ban, European Union regulations on farming, holidays, village gossip, illnesses and their forever growing fear of traditions being lost, jobs being taken by foreigners and their identity being threatened by The Other. This is mainly reflected in the sound part of the piece which is based on actual dialogues that the artists recorded live in countryside pubs. The artists approach these themes from the same angle as the viewers do. They are, just like the viewers, mere outsiders looking in.

The Public House Revisited

Farrago will be pulling  pints soon at The White Hart

More information coming soon

Farrago Ping Pong

Following the recent students and artists protests against cuts in art and education and in collaboration with art students in Den Haag who took to the streets to protest organising 24 hours non-stop ping pong playing in the city streets and in the square in front of the parliament, Farrago produced Relocation, a film, sound and image transfer installation that will be travelling to the next exhibition soon

Farrago at The Shop

Russell has taken part in the Christmas show at The Shop in Cambridge.

Below Russell's installation