DR (The Danish Broadcast Corporation) has a daily programme of 25 minutes interview called VITA. It is a programme that I love to hear and that I admire a lot. When I went to Denmark this July/August I was interviewed by Helle Solvang about the art scene in Copenhagen and in Santiago and also a bit about how to let life take shape in a foreign country: VITA 1. September 2009
By Helle Solvang – Airsquare in Copenhagen on the day of recording
Det var ikke så meget fordi, at jeg var nøgen, det var mere komikken i situationen, et moment af total udstillelse i en række af oplevelser, der kun havde fået magtesløsheden til at vokse og overgivelsen ditto. (1)
This is transit, this is Frankfurt, a corner of a restaurant, green tea and sparkling water.
This is 6 hours and 40 minutes to departure and 17 hours and 41 minutes to arrival. This is the second stop in a tour that started wednesday at 10 o’clock + 6 hours, that is, at 4 o’clock pm two days ago. This is two days and 50 minutes later. This is after visits at the immigration office after closing hour. This is no sleep and computer black out.
This is communication Santiago – Seattle – Sao Paolo – Gothenburg – Paris – Frankfurt – Copenhagen. This is the tour in the carousel. This is the power of centrifugal force. This is a sleepy body in an alert mind. This is a sleepy mind in an alert body.
Så det var der jeg stod, på et afsides handicaptoilet.
Endelig fri, ingen snærende ligninger, ingen skarvende sko, ingen stramme strømper. Kun vand på hud, vand og genoplivede celler, vand, der vågner op. Jeg genkendte mig selv, mærkede. Til dørhåndtaget langsomt bevægede sig ned og døren op, sært sløvt, akkompagneret af mine stadigt hektiske hov.
Hov hov. Hov hov! Hov!! Og dér gled den modvilligt i igen. Ssschlapp, klunk. (2)
Frankfurt Lufthavn, fredag d. 17. juli, 2009
___________
(1) It was not because i was naked, it was the irony of the situation reaching a moment of complete and unwanted exhibisionism after a series of situations that only made the powerlessness grow and concluded my full surrender.
(2) So, I was standing in this handicap toilet with a feeling of freedom, no itching clothes, shoes or socks. Only water, water on my skin, water to revive, to make me wake up. I recognised myself, touched. And here the door handled slowly went down and the door up, unhurriedly, but followed by my increasingly loud; Hov, hov hov! HOV! And that, that was when the door unwillingly closed again. Ssschlap, klunk.
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.
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.
…I would be the Empress of Sisi Airlines – queery flights to difficult destinations.
Detour is The tour!
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, bla bla on writing and language, notes on cph
A word:
palimpsest |ˈpalimpˌsest|
noun
a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.
• figurative something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form : Sutton Place is a palimpsest of the taste of successive owners.
DERIVATIVES
palimpsestic |ˌpalimpˈsestik| adjective
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: via Latin from Greek palimpsēstos, from palin
‘again’ + psēstos ‘rubbed smooth.’
A figure and a book:
Rachilde, Homme de Lettres – Son Oeuvre, Portrait et Autographe by André David
A website:
Mohammed Image Archive
A sentence and a tune:
“What’s love got to, got to do with it?”
A film:
Derek Jarman’s Blue
(I’m indebted to Akram Zaatari and his work This Day (2003, 86 minutes) for the title of this post. Thank you for an inspiration, which in this case is more of an association than a theoretical consideration)
Filed under: notes on cph
“It is a curious fact of literary history that canon formation has been particularly aggressive following wars, when nationalist feeling runs high and there is a strong wish to define a tradition.”
Elaine Showalter, the introduction to The New Feminist Criticism
(quoted in Naomi Schor’s George Sand & Idealism, p. 25)
