{"id":173,"date":"2022-03-08T11:08:37","date_gmt":"2022-03-08T09:08:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nivel.teak.fi\/carpa7\/?p=173"},"modified":"2022-10-04T10:18:05","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T07:18:05","slug":"writing-sites-of-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nivel.teak.fi\/carpa7\/writing-sites-of-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing sites of silence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I will take my recently completed spoken-word performance work Between Our Words I Will Trace Your Presence <\/em>\u2013 from which I will perform an excerpt \u2013 as the starting point for discussing the place of writing in my work. Specifically, I will explore my artistic research\u2019s capacity to examine different sites of silence; familial, textual and institutional. My work deals with silence not as a sensate phenomenon, but as something relational; something enacted or performed, founded in acts of repression and denial; its character always specific to a given set of circumstances, but always characterised by the presence of something unspoken or unheard. In my examination of such silences, I have found myself adopting strategies which draw on Jane Rendell\u2019s model of \u2018site writing\u2019. Also developing a mode of autofiction writing, which is informed by Mona Livholts\u2019 conception of a \u2018situated writing\u2019 practice and which lays emphasis on insights localised in the writing-subject\u2019s position. Together, these approaches create a writing subject, whose presence and experience are central to the creation of both site and knowledge. My writing also aspires to a performative \u2013 as opposed to an expositional \u2013 agency and through spoken word performances, I have been performing my writing. In this presentation, I will discuss my writing practice and introduce the issues raised by the proposition that my writing and my performance of my research have the potential to create distinctive relationships between researcher, knowledge and audience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to focus on the emergent part played by writing in my work; specifically, its role in making legible the silences which my practice has begun disclosing at different orders of site. My writing emerges in response to my experience of site, and a diversity of different relationships between site and writing have in turn emerged as important to my reflection on my practice. Jane Rendell\u2019s notion of \u2018site writing\u2019 provides a useful reference-point in exploring that practice. Rendell describes site writing thus: \u2018a critical and ethical spatial practice that explores what happens when discussions concerning situatedness and site-specificity enter the writing of criticism, history and theory\u2019 (Rendell 2019\u20132022). My own work has suggested an ever-expanding definition of what the notion of site can encompass, which reflects Rendell\u2019s proposition that sites may include those \u2018material, political and conceptual \u2013 as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined\u2019 (ibid.). I will examine several instances of my writing in response to site, and consider the role of that writing in each case; it\u2019s relationship to site, to \u2018situatedness\u2019, to performance and to knowledge production.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

1\/. The University of Bergen Natural History Museum<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Silence in my understanding may be performed or enforced. For my work, silence encompasses the notion of being<\/em> silent; that is, leaving things unspoken, or equally of being silenced<\/em>; also embracing the idea of a silence created by the act of not hearing; not having heard. In other words, a denial that one has<\/em> heard. Crucially, in each case, the silences with which I\u2019m concerned are revealed not as sites of absence, but as sites of repressed presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In making my work, I\u2019ve found myself inhabiting different silences at different kinds of site. In the first instance, an example of an institutional silence; that found at the university\u2019s natural history museum, in Bergen, Norway. The \u201cobject\u201d of the institutional silence I identified here concerns the presence of the museum\u2019s \u2018wrong bodies\u2019; the bodies of pests and insects in the museum\u2019s midst, which ordinarily remain absent from the institution\u2019s public discourse, but with which the museum has a covert, complex relationship; gathering and cataloguing their captured carcasses to create a curious private analogue of its public collection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the presence of these wrong bodies within the museum is ordinarily a matter of public silence, their history is charted in informal, typically anecdotal, subordinate and marginal narratives, shared amongst museum staff, across generations. I was drawn to these marginal narratives, including accounts of events in 1979, when the museum was compelled to react to a particularly invasive insect infestation in a dramatic manner, which forced the presence of its \u201cwrong bodies\u201d into the public realm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After gathering and compiling verbatim transcripts of eyewitness and anecdotal accounts of these events, with the permission of my contributors, I began to rework them into a vivid polyphonic narrative, which became a part of a planned, spoken-word performance, to be staged at the museum, and titled \u2018The Wrong Bodies\u2019<\/em>. Here is an excerpt from that narrative<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n