MALETA
2023 onwards
MALETA (suitcase in Spanish) is a project that utilises an everyday suitcase that transforms into a location and container for meaningful social change.
A gallery, a stage, an office, a classroom, a story, a sanctuary, a computer: MALETA is a unique space that through engagement with creative and performative research ideas, used collaboratively, can bring about important personal revelations and subsequent social change.
Everything experienced through MALETA is contained within or on MALETA.
MALETA is a fully mobile, transportable vessel. An embodiment and symbol of every revelation it has facilitated and contains; it is an accumulative physical and virtual source of energy and archive of learning.
The project MALETA is inspired by the 1963 Chilean surrealist short film ‘La Maleta’ by Raul Ruiz. ‘La Maleta’ depicts a person carrying a suitcase on their travels who learns that within the suitcase is another version of themselves. MALETA extends this symbolism for the possibilities of the suitcase as a repository for personal and collective illumination and subsequently, social change.
This short film was made during the the January 2023 month long student residential visit from the University of Derby to Nevada, USA. Facilitated by the Office for the Arts at Nevada State University, this cohort of art school students from the University of Derby of various specific disciplines collaborated together under the instruction of Dr. Gemma Marmalade and her research project 'MALETA'. 'What we left if the desert' featured within 'How love lives in two places': an exhibition of over 30 artists from Derby, UK and Nevada, USA which considered object and place through interdisciplinary practice led by research concepts informed by performative practices. Hosted by FORMAT International Photography Festival, Derby, March 2023.