6.11.25 – 3.12.25
Sain Cofio is a digital living room, a living archive constructed from personal objects associated with memories of Wales from its diaspora, culminating in a shared experience of Welsh cultural memory and explored through live conversations between Darya and Aur. We meet here with a new object or memory throughout the residency, co-building a living room of our personal necessities for remembering and performing Wales from afar. You are invited for a paned or dishgled, to look through our archive, pick up a recipe, look at our performative books and eavesdrop as we discuss our relationship with Wales.
Beginning with an empty living room, we question what exists in the space between the places we’ve exiled to and Wales and how do we imagine Wales from outside. How are memories filling the gaps, and how can we capture this in a tangible way? Throughout the residency we will explore various objects in our surroundings, the mundane and the symbolic that hold personal significance to our experiences of the Welsh diaspora. We explore allegiances between our diverse understandings of Welshness, using personal archives and memories to unite our subjectivities. The personal archives hold anecdotes, humour, shared experiences and unexplainable irony, the present and past in a non linear space: diary pages, band merchandise, archived clips and family recipes.
Through live conversations we aim to revisit cultural markers and understand the objects from personal anecdotes, family connections and un-romanticised memories to question their significance to understand how we enact, remember, or perform our Welshness. As a digital space, this living room opens up the conversation to other Welsh diaspora, an invitation to explore multifaceted and diverse ideas of Welshness, fostering a shared space for reflection on cultural memory to create a living archive and resource from memory.
Darya and Aur met through Peak Cymru’s residency PEGWN – brought together to explore language and land, they found other overlapping experiences and interests grounded in Welsh identity. They are exploring ways of collaborating to develop their shared interest in Welsh cultural memory.
Aur is an Artist-Curator from mid Wales with an MA in Contemporary Curating from Manchester School of Art. Their research focuses on how collaborative curatorial methods can actively engage with cultural memory- focusing on interdisciplinary, participatory and durational techniques. They’re interested in creating spaces for this engagement with Welsh cultural memory, collaborating to reveal alternative narratives through the mundane and every-day rituals and re-imagining presupposed views of Welsh identity.
Darya Saoirse Williams is a spatial designer and MA Architecture student at the Royal College of Art. Originally from Aberdare and now based in London, her current work explores how cultural memory, language, and landscape can shape architectural intervention. She has explored alternative approaches to the remediation of post-industrial land through ritual, procession, and bilingual design methods. Drawing from her Welsh-Iranian heritage and architectural background, she develops participatory, place-based strategies that challenge extractive legacies and engage with ways of taking a measure of the land.
View residence page