Proposal 2020 Baltic Shoreside Writers Residency

[Still from “The Vampyre” (2017) by Tai Shani]

R Dorey




Proposal for Baltic Shoreside writer’s residency.




2019 Turner Prize co-winner Tai Shani has for a number of years been producing artworks as part of a series called “Dark Continent” (DC), named for Freud’s famous description of the “unknowable” sexuality of adult women. DC concerns women in proximity with overwhelmingly chaotic natural forces and isolation, and constitute a feminist project which seeks to re-examine what “woman” is beyond essentialist categories and structures.

The stories in DC are about sensation, and attempts to negotiate the indescribable. One artwork from DC that I am very interested in developing a critical text in response to is “The Vampyre”, which tells the story of the “spectral figure of an eternal vampire at the bottom of the ocean, forever caught on the threshold between life and death” (Shani, n.d.).

Two strands of my own research over the last year have been the strategies of “autotheory” and the concept of the “EcoGothic”.

Theorist David Del Principe summarises the EcoGothic as taking a “familiar Gothic subject – nature– taking a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that the environment, species, and nonhumans play in the construction of monstrosity and fear”, positioning this alongside “EcoFeminism” which “seeks to question the mutual oppression of women, animals, and nature” (Del Principe, 2014, p. 1). Artist Lauren Fournier likewise positions autotheory within a “feminist genealogy” and “between academia and the art world” (Fournier, 2018, p. 642).

For the Baltic residency at Shoreside I would use the unique context of solitude and focus at the periphery of the North Sea, employing autotheory to write about The Vampyre as an EcoGothic text. The studies of autotheory and the EcoGothic are both in their early stages, and likewise Shani has only recently become the subject of a book “Our Fatal Magic” (SHANI, 2019), which reproduces the scripts from DC. The Vampyre, combined with the affective conditions of this residency would allow me to produce a creative and critical piece of writing which illuminates the overlaps in these areas of feminist study, as well as the work of an artist who is only just beginning to receive significant attention.

As a non-binary, disabled writer, this artwork and theoretical concepts are all of personal relevance, dealing as they do with the permeable borders of the idea of woman. Writers connected to autotheory such as Dodie Bellamy and Johanna Hedva have begun to make a space where disability and sickness can be creatively considered alongside power structures such as gender, race, or class. However I have yet to find writing which extends this into issues of ecology, and believe The Vampyre (which concerns the edges of the human, the ocean, the non-human, and death) offers a site to explore this further.

I believe I could make great use of this opportunity to produce a critical text from the unique conditions of the residency. The focus on personal experience to autotheory, and affect to The Vampyre, can be met through time in isolation in the proximity with nature at the point between land and sea.

Bibliography:

Bellamy, D. (2004). The letters of Mina Harker. Terrace Books, University of Wisconsin Press.

Del Principe, D. (2014). Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century. Gothic Studies, 16(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.7227/GS.16.1.1

Fournier, L. (2018). Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice. A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 33(3), 643–662. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2018.1499495

Hedva, J. (2016). Sick Woman Theory. Mask Magazine. http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory

Shani, T. (n.d.). DARK CONTINENT: THE VAMPYRE. Tai Shani. Retrieved 27 November 2019, from https://www.taishani.com/dark-continent-the-vampyre

SHANI, T. (2019). OUR FATAL MAGIC. STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS.

Smith, A., & Hughes, W. (Eds.). (2015). Ecogothic. Manchester University Press. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4706038