Charles Olsen

Charles' Story

Son of an Anglican priest and an opera singer, Charles moved from Wellington to England in 1981. After graduating in 1994 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Middlesex University, London, and exhibiting widely, he travelled to Spain in 2003 because of his interest in the Spanish painters Velasquez and Goya, and to study flamenco guitar. He combined flamenco and art in his first short film The dance of the brushes which was awarded second prize in the I Festival Flamenco de Cortometrajes, 2010. Together with Colombian poet Lilián Pallares, the flamenco pianist Pablo Rubén Maldonado and flamenco dancer Selene Muñoz, he created the performance Agita Flamenco which was presented in the New Zealand pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2011 and the Sala Manuel de Falla of the SGAE, Madrid, 2012. In Madrid he began participating in poetry readings and this led to the publication of three poetry collections, Sr Citizen (2011, with a foreword by New Zealand poet Pat White), Antípodas (2016) and La rebeldía del sol (Rebellious Sun, 2022). His writings and translations have appeared in Landfall, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Cordite Poetry Review, Blackmail Press, Neke, El País and Trasdemar. He set up the poetry competition in Spanish Palabras Prestadas in 2011 and has run Given Words for National Poetry Day
since 2016. His award-winning poetry films have been included in international festivals and featured in the online magazines Moving Poems, Poetry Film Live, and Atticus Review. He has contributed to the book The Poetics of Poetry Film (Intellect Books, 2021), an essay he wrote on the videopoetry of Colombia was published in The London Magazine and in Spanish in WMagazín, 2022, and his article on poetry film in Aotearoa How to Film a
Poem was published on Readingroom in 2023. Normally behind the camera Charles had his first acting role in a film written and directed by the Spanish director Jesús Pulpón, filmed in Munich in 2022. With Lilián Pallares he has facilitated writing and filmmaking workshops for children through to residents of Llar d'Avis Geriatric Residency in Barcelona. In 2020/21 they received an Artists’ Residency at the Centre for Artists’ Residencies Matadero Madrid on the theme of ‘Childhood, Play and Public Space’, during which they carried out a number of workshops for children and adults and created the award-winning te reo Māori poetry film Noho Mai. In 2023 they ran a poetry film workshop with the ONCE Foundation as part of their Biennale of Contemporary Art on the theme of Woman and Disability, producing the piece A-Dentro (In-Side). In 2022/23 they received the Our Little Roses Poetry Fellowship to give creative poetry classes at an orphanage for girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, during which they made silencio gris (Grey Silence, selected for the ZEBRINO Award for the Best Poetry Film for Children and Youth, ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, Berlin, 2023).