Friday 15 October 2010

The Visceral Narratives colloquium

The Visceral Narratives colloquium was a very good experience, what I came to Goldsmiths for - true interdisciplinary dialogue. I really enjoyed hearing about the work of the two other artist researchers, Katya Oicherman and Claudine Leroux, whose work has so many overlaps with my own, but is also completely different. I’d like to present with them again –
these are our blurbs:


Claudine Leroux, “Drawing the lines of Memory”. Claudine will deal with the creative process involved when verbalizing images of events experienced in early childhood, and which can only be accessed through a sensory memory. She will focus on the shift of perspective in perception of the self through time, its spatial dimension and its emotional charge, when writing for a reader.

Katya Oicherman, “Binding Auto/Biographies”. In her work, Katya recreates traditional Jewish ceremonial textiles, using her own family history as a basis for the embroidered text in the work. Hi/stories of Jewisness are staged and told as a mixed-media autobiography, interplaying text and stitch. Telling / writing / embroidering are related in terms of the notions of uniqueness and narration and contextualized within feminine writing and contemporary craft theory.

Eleanor Dare, “Figure and ground: the body as a locus of narrative and knowing”. Eleanor will investigate the ways bodies and language are intertwined and examine how illness or trauma require us to speak from the body in different terms from those of orthodox academic research or Cartesian epistemologies. In particular, she will look at embodiment as a basis for the re-conceptualisation of digitally mediated life-writing.

It was very generous of Lucia Boldrini to organise and chair this colloquium for us and not even talk about her own work! I heard Lucia read her paper on Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang in Copenhagen (June 2010) and was hoping to hear more, but I guess three talkers is a good number for one afternoon. The discussion was valuable as well. I’m always amazed when people can be bothered to ask good qurestions, so that is always a bonus…I want to do this again and see how Katya and Claudine’s work develops – their work is brilliant, I feel very lucky to have presensted with them today.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for an interesting afternoon.

    I was wondering about a section in your talk, a quote that put many parts of what I am currently trying to figure out in my BA dissertation in new light. It was about 'becoming space' according to my notes, but was not fast enough to get more than that. Would it be possible to get a hold of that quote?

    All the best

    Vendela

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Vendela -
    I think you are refering to the Roger Callois quote:

    Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species
    (Caillois, 1935).
    link to it here:
    http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpcaillois.htm

    ReplyDelete