The Pleasures and Terrors of Institutional Comfort - Paul Jobling in conversation with Magali Nougarède, Floc Gallery Space, University of Wales, Newport

I was invited to conduct a conversation on 20 May 2009 with photographer Magali Nougarède about her recent work in progress in the Ffloc Gallery at the University of Wales, Newport. I have been evolving a dialogue with Magali, who is a former graduate and visiting lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Architecture, about theory and practice in photography since I delivered a lecture about her exhibition of photo-portraits, ‘Crossing the Line’, at the Gardner Arts Centre, University of Sussex in January 2006. Magali’s latest project concentrates on a set of tea towels that have been handed down her family line and that she displays alongside 10 x 8 analogue black and white photographs of them and other images to explore questions about female identity and belonging. Building on the idea of ‘fabric as threshold’, therefore, the conversation illuminated topics such as haptic visuality, the genealogy and aesthetics of the everyday object, the diasporan object as a site of memory, and what constitutes the ‘thingness’ of the thing. Attended by students and staff from the Department of Photography at Newport, including Professor Mark Durden and Dr Ian Walker, the conversation (including time for questions and answers) lasted 90 minutes. It was video-recorded and will shortly be added to the digital archive of artists’ conversations at Newport.