In this blog, Owain Train McGilvary—Creative Wales-BSR Fellow at the BSR from September to December 2025—shares reflections on his residency experience and the research he presented at the December 2025 Winter Open Studios.
With my practice I’m attracted to sub-cultural activity, where in the past I have worked with wrestlers, drag artists, musicians, DJ’s, writers and other artists to create multidisciplinary works in the form of video installations.
My initial proposal uses the figure of RanXerox, a terminator-esque character set in a degraded and dystopian version of Rome. His origin story is that he is made out of xerox paper by a group of teenagers and I was interested in that metaphor of the creation of a body, as well as ideas around fan fiction being used as a strategy for re-imagining a lived experience and current political affairs.
Collage, I would say, is my main weapon of choice. I think a lot about how it touches the fringes of video, painting and drawing. There’s room for an infinite amount of stuff and the constellation of images and material can construct many different (and confusing) relationships. This is my first time in Rome and my first time on a residency outside of Britain, so I was ready to succumb to what Rome and Italy had to offer to my perception of a new cultural context. Before I got to Rome, I found Valerio Mattioli’s writing from Remoria: La Città Invertita (2019) extremely useful in a collagist methodology on navigating the city. He constructs the city as a circle (an anus), surrounded by all this other stuff (the shit) that muddies the romanticised ideas of how Rome is portrayed. That in itself was inspired by queer and feminist thought, namely Paul B. Preciado’s Anal Terror.
RanXerox was helpful as a starting point of the residency – all the other ‘stuff’ allowed me to map out the city from my own experience. These included seeing the backstreets of Rome, areas such as Pigneto, the Mussolini-era athlete sculptures at Foro Italico, Italian modernist painting, ‘The New Fascist Body’ by Dagmar Herzog, Pier Paolo Pasolini films and poems, as well as the conversations and discussions that I have had with other residents.
Drawing and obsessively photographing was the only way I knew how to bring my experience of the city back into the orbit of my studio. I made my own paper to draw on, I made hybridised drawings of figures taken from a plethora of references, I did cut and paste collages from sculptures, I did some writing, I had time to read books and revisit a video work I began before the residency which now felt right to develop. Nothing is fixed here. It’s all more debris to play with and muddy.
The residency at the British School at Rome means that I have been afforded time and a full immersion into studio practice, something that I haven’t been able to have since my undergraduate degree.
Last Sunday evening a few of us gathered in front of the fire in the dining hall and we read English translated Pasolini poems to each other as I filmed them with the help of Ethan (another resident). This felt like a pivotal moment here, in that to creating an environment with folk in other disciplines and cultural contexts, we can collectivise and discuss our unique sets of knowledge through poetry. These poems from the 60s feel relevant in 2025.
– Angry hissing of the defensive rich man.
– Cream of blood of the offensive poor man.
– Bourgeois brain devoid of the idea of class struggle!
– Heart benighted by the mystery of no idea of class struggle!
‘A Series of Atomic Explosions’ by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1963)
I think I am more angry since being in Rome? There’s a lot to be angry about. Pasolini knew this well.
