Filed under: notes on cph
she went to the beach to go for a walk. she sat on the shore and looked at some stones. black and white. she picked five. she walked with the waves, pushed by the wind. she kept cuddling the stones, right hand, left hand. black and white. she threw five. she passed by a park and threw a stone. then another, then another. at the end of the road and with empty hands, she thought to herself: i’ve moved some stones.
India Song (1975) by Marguerite Duras - 1 minute and 3 seconds are now available on YouTube
the music, the painful cry of one of marie stretter’s abandoned lovers, the incense, the sense of death, the slowness and the spatial use of the mirror. isn’t it great
(a former comment on India Song)
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, Livet i London / Notes on London, notes on cph
“Neighbourhood is a tissue of looks” Quotation found on the last page of a notebook – think it dates back from Home Works IV, Beirut.
The idea of looks as a tissue is smooth and soft or claustrophobic and strangling. It adds tactility to the imprint of the social on our bodies. And remembers me to either draw the curtains or expose my intimacy to the others. It reminds me of the stalker in London, the young guy who followed me into our garden and suddenly looked at me through the kitchen window establishing a strange hybrid of my own face reflexion and his hooded black cheeks, eyes, mouth, and nose. We shared a gaze of no direction and of no fear – for at least 2 or 3 seconds – until i remembered that i had to feel it, the fear, and backed out, ran upstairs and asked the guys for help. Maybe his gaze was about the complexity of touch. Maybe it was about facing the other. I surely felt a Levinasian moment of encounter was created, that something had been trespassed leaving me able to surrender to the other. The encounter existed for seconds, it was framed by the time of my cat eyes’ ability to change perspective in the dark; from a reflexion of myself to his face, the face of the other. Yet, a distancing and reflexive material kept us apart, i was inside, he was outside and the window made us aware. Ideas of property made me alert to the danger of the situation and what remained after it was a bodily anxiety engendered by these streets, in my neighbourhood where letterboxes turned into potential stalkers and hasty gazes flickered from under my cap. Regardless of my experience i still want to be stubborn, to let the tissue of looks be a backdrop, a cloth that firemen holds when a self-malicious person wants to commit suicide from the top of a building. I cannot but believe in my surroundings and I beg for this tissue to be strong enough, to let it bear me in my free fall into place.
In spring 2008 I travelled to Beirut together with artist Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfelt to attend the international forum on cultural practices; Home Works IV organised by the Lebanese Association of Plastique Arts, Ashkal Alwan. Inspired by the experience of leaving Copenhagen and coming back we wrote the article Fin de Copenhague 2008, which you can find in the magazine Internationalistisk Ideale edited by Marie Kølbæk. Look for page 47.
Later, in June 2008, I participated in the seminar Art and Research : New Interfaces held by the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies in collaboration with Goldsmiths College of London and Freie Universität, Berlin. The seminar was intense and thought proviking – still lingering in my mind.
This was my abstract:
Abstract for Art and Research: New Interfaces. Copenhagen, June 5-7, 2008
The writer as producer
Walter Benjamin described the ”author as producer”. To inhabit the position of a producer brings forth the potential of the political. To produce is understood as creating a text that will make people take a stand. It also means that the writer is the producer of something – a written text. In academia we are taught to produce texts, but not to understand ourselves as a producer. The elimination of the border between art and research could be a way to open toward the space of creating producers. Artists have for a long while learned from theory and academia, while academics are just about to learn from artistic processes in their reasearch and writings.
My own practice as an academic is shaped by the non-existence of a space for the academic producer. I therefore place myself between three fields:
Academically I work on biographical representations of historical persons within contemporary art. I look at the ways in which contemporary artists convey the life of a person in relation to literary theory on biography, the notion of re-enactment and the archive.
Personally I have over a 12 year period collected letters, stories, publications and interviews about my female ancestors. It is a project on its own and has similar traits of the artworks I am writing about.
Outside of academia i collaborate in an ungoing art project with an artist on two imaginary female theorists. I also have a writing collective with an art theorist where we are working on a writing workshop for art writers.
This paper will touch upon the consequences of such a devided practice. Inspired by the art scene in Beirut, Lebanon, and a writer/philospher/artist such as Jalal Toufic I will look at why we should and how we can create a greater space for the writer as producer both within academia and the art scene in the future.
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, bla bla on writing and language
Les dents, la bouche
Les dents la bouchent
L’aidant la bouche
Laides en la bouche
Lait dans la bouche
______
Foucault, Michel. “Theatrum Philosophicum” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews. Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1977, p.180
