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MALTATODAY 21 July 2019

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THIS WEEK PHOTOGRAPHY maltatoday | SUNDAY • 21 JULY 2019 4 First of all, what led you to decide to collaborate on this particular project together, and what were the first stages of the project like? Ann Dingli: Joanna and I have been collaborating for a while. We align very much on our interests and have mutual respect for each other's practice, which means our ideas are able to gestate in a very healthy and reinforced way when we work together. Specifically, with this exhibition, Joanna told me about her plans to visit Green Bank while I was liv- ing in Connecticut, USA, so geographi- cally, it worked. Thematically, the idea of looking at a community that was restricted in their access to the Inter- net intrigued me. Aside from my inter- est in digital storytelling, I have always been fascinated with my own relation- ship with the internet. I saw it as a per- sonal experiment as much as a research project. The first stage of the project was the actual visit. Joanna, myself and Mark Leonard – who also contributes to the exhibition – made an approxi- mate nine-hour trip from New Haven, Connecticut to Green Bank, West Vir- ginia in a tiny city car. After we success- fully reached the town we went about looking for willing residents to speak to us about community life – of which we found many. We learned so much in just one week, but Joanna visited again a year later and stayed for a whole month. Joanna Demarco: In 2017, my flights to America were quite an impulsive 3am purchase, and I was set to face any fears and go to Green Bank on my own. How- ever, at that time Ann (who was living in the US) and I were in touch, and often spoke about potential collaborations and ran ideas past each other. When I told her about my project in Green Bank, she was immediately on board. This year, I revisited Green Bank for a month without Ann to continue the research thanks to the Malta Research Fund from the Malta Arts Council. I would say that my first trip there with Ann was very different to the second. The first time round we were still dis- covering the place and meeting people, and taking in the whole experience of the place. The second time round I feel that I went there with more clarity as to what my objectives were. How does the particular situation of Green Bank tie into both your interests? AD: I've always been very drawn to the online world as a space for relationship- building. It might seem like a bleak or undesirable reality, but the truth is many of my relationships – both past and present – have unfolded online; whether or not they also existed in the offline world. It's known by experts in cyber-psychology that we act differently when we're online – we're less inhib- ited, less safe, more likely to reveal parts of ourselves that we wouldn't in face-to- face interactions. As such, I've always felt as though growing up in the inter- net age was an inextricable part of how my identity was shaped. So, with Green Bank, I was wildly interested in what life could look like if the online dimension to personal development was effectively stripped away. JD: I have been interested in the sub- ject of how constant communication and developing technologies are af- fecting humans and society ever since working on my University dissertation in 2011, which dealt with the same top- ic. I think, having gone through adoles- cence with the birth of home internet, and reached adulthood with the dawn of social media, I have somehow always been aware that such technologies were altering both me and the world around me, and this fascinated me. In 2014, I pursued an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography and, since then, I have always wanted to find sto- ries linked with the research I had done as an undergrad. This town felt like the perfect opportunity to do just that. Given the collaborative nature of the exhibition, how did you two set about working together to structure what eventually became the final product? AD: Our main driver for this exhibi- tion format has been to tell a genuine Through photography by Joanna Demarco and text by Ann Dingli, the upcoming exhibition The Spaces That Connect Us offers a peek into Green Bank, located in the Appalachian Mountain Range in the Pocahontas County of West Virginia and within 'America's National Quiet Zone'. TEODOR RELJIC speaks to the artists about their exploration of an utterly rare phenomenon in the western world: a town almost entirely bereft of an internet connection Dispatches from the "There seems to be more money and more meaning ful 'PR' available for visual artists, but there are still problems – cliques, lack of resources, lack of public interest, lack of critics" – Ann Dingli Teodor Reljic Photography by Joanna Demarco Ann Dingli (back) and Joanna Demarco

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