Proposals: ‘Thinking Through Extinction’ Writing Residency (Corridor8)

 

Proposal

“Thinking Through Extinction” (TTE) offers an opportunity to develop, share and combine strands of my research with those of other practitioners and produce a kind of writing I am very eager to pursue at this point.

I am interested in the resonance between écriture féminine, and non-human life and systems. Following the former, (a Simon O’Sullivan’s provocation for “art history as a kind of creative writing”) I would approach this writing residency with the aim not of writing something that attempts to encapsulate or translate the ideas, workshops and artworks of TTE, but of making a new creative work that reconfigures and derives something else from them via experimental speculative fiction.

Dying, mourning, (individual/species) death, and the encounter of non-human scale time and subjectivity are concern for writers like Acker and Cixous (in both her theory of writing, and her analyses of the author Clarice Lispector), just as they are for speculative fiction authors such as N. K. Jemisin and Rivers Solomon, or EcoGothic writers.

Working closely with Laurence Payot, the rest of the team, and the public workshops, I would use writing techniques such as “appropriation”, “diagrammatics”, and “parataxis” to take the aesthetic, ethical, and theoretical positions and develop an oblique approach through speculative fiction.

Dealing with the impossibility of representing alterity (whether the non-human, death, or the scale of extinction events) through worldbuilding and experimental approaches to text, allows this writing to sit in collaboration with the rest of the project, rather than as an account, distillation, or translation.

Relevant experience

Patricia MacCormack’s concept of the “Ahuman” propose how animals can be recognised and given ethical consideration not in their relationships-to, or differences-from Human, but as beings in their own right who are never knowable to humans.

My PhD used “the Ahuman”; the practice of artists like Tai Shani; and the theory of Cixous and Acker; to propose an approach to art practice which normalises the incomplete, unknown, or collapsing, through the prioritising of care.

Continuing from my PhD work on Acker and Cixous I have a chapter on ecology and death forthcoming in Revenant journal’s forthcoming issue “Apocalyptic Waste: Studies in Environmental Threat and Nightmare Spaces”. In June my collaborative project on plant horror opens at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, and I am presently one of FACT’s artist fellows developing an interactive text which merges écriture féminine with ecosophy.

I have previously been commissioned to create a creative response to artists' work via eco-horror, including for “Its Origins are Indeterminate” for Whitechapel Gallery, and “Alembic” for Res. (sample attached) both in 2018.

For seven years I facilitated an award winning collaborative art programme at a North London SEN school, and the examination of the ethical and power relations when supporting agency in a diverse group underpins my interest in, and approach to, collaboration. I also ran a collaborative publishing and curation project which examines the economies of power in art, and was part of the collective A.A.S. Last year I co-produced the collective crip solidarity publication “Horse Bites Fence”.