Event overview
This seminar draws on the metaphor of breathing space to explore the complexities of inhabiting, speculating on and speaking through intertwined fictional others & self-hoods
Here we are –
Energy,
Mass,
Life,
Shaping life,
Mind,
Shaping mind...
– Octavia E. Butler
Proposing the breathing space as a condition of generative possibility for the emergence of speculative entities, absent voices and auto-theoretical self-versioning, we will explore questions of speaking for/with/as in ways that both embrace the unboundedness of the self whilst acknowledging the specificities of positionality that are involved in any act of narration.
A breathing space may be a new condition to claim through a speculative fiction mode, whilst announce it missing from this world; it may be a state of rest, daydreaming and dissociation that both offers respite from, and arguably enables, the operation of regimes of efficiency which demand the continuous presentation of self; it may be a site of inhabitance shared between writer/ performer and voice of someone else. How do different ways of working with persona/ character propose different models of selfhood as multiple, entangled and processual? Can the breathing space of one subject become a medium for another, by 'making space' for 'someone' else? How does self-narration become compulsive within a horizon of endless self-branding and how can this model of presence be resisted?
We will explore different modalities of the breathing space as a medium for voices, to probe how a character/voice may come to a space to speak.
This is an Art Research Seminar, run as part of the Art Research Programme at Goldsmiths College and supported by the Mountain of Art Research (http://m-a-r-s.online).
Katarina Rankovic is an artist working in text, performance and video, using these platforms to invoke narrative as a testing ground for examining author-character-reader subject relations.
Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and now based in London and Athens. Embracing contingency, humour and lo-fi media, her work explores autobiographical writing and bodily inscription in the performance and representation of subjectivity.
Rowena Harris is an artist exploring theories on the datalogical in relation to neurodiversity. She is interested in those at the margins of algorithmic priorities, and, through modes of speculative fiction, alternative spaces of thinking differently.
Michelle Williams Gamaker's work explores the fiction-making machine of 20th Century British and Hollywood studio films by restaging sequences to reveal cinematic construction, and recasting characters to propose alternative endings that counter their often doom-laden plight.
Professor Kristen Kreider is a writer, a poet, who works in collaboration with the architect James O’Leary to engage with sites of architectural and cultural interest through performance, installation and time-based media. Her research stems from an interest in the poetics of thought, its materialization as form, and a concern with how artworks relate to the world.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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14 Nov 2019 | 10:00am - 1:00pm |
Accessibility
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