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Once upon a time, Amanda Belantara left the United States and never looked back. From the moment of her departure, Amanda’s life has been a series of amazing adventures. She fell in love in Bali, got a ring tattooed on her finger, married on top of a mountain, and plans to spend the rest of her days making riotous art while exploring the unknown. And the rest, my dears, is history.
I’m a visual artist and documentary filmmaker originally from Pueblo, Colorado. I met my husband Michael seven years ago in an airport on the way to study music in Bali. We lived together in a small village called Bangah for the summer and married five weeks later on a volcano at sunrise and we’ve been traveling and living abroad for the most part ever since. Travels and work in countries like Indonesia, Japan, France, Greece, and Italy have led us to where we’ve lived the past couple of years- Manchester, UK. But having not lived in any particular place for so long…I’m not sure where home is. I originally came Manchester to complete a masters in Visual Anthropology and have stayed here working with the art collective, Kinokophone and doing my own freelance work since then including creating documentaries, installations and sound projects, and developing other projects along the way like ArchitectSpiders. Earlier this year I had the fortune to be a resident artist in Yamaguchi, Japan at the Akiyoshidai International Art Village. There I created a collaborative and experimental film called 耳がきゅっとなる (Ears are Dazzled, touched by sound). I chose to create this form of non-narrative film because what I wish to achieve through my work is to not so much inform or explain but to create/present sensations and places for audiences to re-experience the everyday and reconsider places often taken for granted. But if I had to do something else, I might be creating pop up books, writing stories, or being a librarian. I feel very lucky to be having this experience; it’s always a little surreal, especially when I re-visit places that were once very new and unfamiliar. Now I arrive and know how to get by there. Living abroad has inspired us. We’ve picked up a few things in our travels and added to our lifestyles: not wearing shoes inside, house slippers, tea drinking, milk in tea, sambal, not using cars, making my own salad dressing.
 Athens near Omonia  Ueno Koen, Tokyo  New Year's Eve Fox Parade, Tokyo  Provence  Chester, UK  Beijing  Red Square, Moscow  Shuho Town, Japan  Akiyoshi Plain  Filming in Yamaguchi City with noise artist Ishii Eiichi  Arriving in Manchester, UK  Estonian Forest  Estonian Singing Ampitheatre  Danish Island  Romanian Pigs in Denmark  Along the river in Kyoto with artist Eisuke Yanagisawa  "Life Library" Still  "Nobu San" Still one responseLeave a Reply |
Amanda, these pictures are amazing. I can’t wait to see you in Vancouver.