ACCA
Before I begin if anyone here is Deaf, I have a transcript of my talk I can give to you if you want or need. See www.3ply.net/talk
[SLIDE]
Kia Ora, I grew up in Aotearoa, but now live in the ironbark bushlands of Jaara Country, where I am the latest in a sequence of waves of uninvited guests, that peaked in density with the Chinese and Anglo gold prospectors. [SLIDE] These days, this valley is mostly occupied by birds, kangaroos and wallabies and frogs and bees and turtles and yabbies and flies and moths and mosquitos.
Let me acknowledge my debt and gratitude to the Dja Dja Wurrung elders past and present and emerging who care for this country, and this community, especially Uncle Rick Nelson whose leadership, kindness and generosity enables creative practice here in these bushlands of Jaara country.
[SLIDE] Over the past seven months of Covid isolation, I’ve come to know this country more intimately. I started a practice of walking the land at sunrise and sunset, of noticing shifts in the plants, their growth and flowering and decay and dormancy. I’ve been paying attention to the ways animals move across country, like the lone black wallaby who passes each night across the creek where I have tied a trail camera, following a regular choreography as he makes his way along the creek bank, and lingers near a tree stump to listen to the sounds of the night.
Since I ceased my commute to the city, the bushlands have become my studio. When the work at home orders came into effect, I had many complex, collaborative projects underway. Over the past 7 months, I have gradually found ways to continue each of these projects conceptually, but radically collapse my site of making to this valley, and the materiality to my own body, and to the living and non-living plants and animals and winds and rain here on Jaara country, that keep me company as I work.
[SLIDE]
Here are some sounds sampled from a collaboration with Bryan Phillips, work-in-progress that has been supported by our respective children, Zeno, Sam and Nawel. I acknowledge the children here for their practical support sometimes, and their energetic accompaniment always, and especially during homeschooling.
Let us listen to Jaara country, as I walk and work.
Listening - field recording
Now that I have acknowledged Jaara Country through listening, I would like to invite you to share in the chat your acknowledgments of the country where you are, and to acknowledge place by bringing your attention to the sounds that you can hear around you, and sharing your description of these sounds within the chat. My hope is that we may be able to activate a kind of co-authoring of this event as a shared, collaborative text.
I thought that perhaps I could offer you a gift for later, a reading that was in turn offered to me, [SLIDE] by my close friend and collaborator Katie West. Katie is not from Jaara country; her mob are Yindjibarndi, from the Pilbara in the north of Western Australia. And the paper Katie previously shared with me is ‘Co-becoming Bawaka’. It is also from the north, but the north east, from north east Arnhem Land. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful, deeply collaborative paper, where the narrative is shaped through the common task of digging for ganguri, or yams. With the homeland of Bawaka as lead author, we are invited to join together in digging for yams, and to experience what it means to live in a world that is relational, that co-becomes with us and with each other. I am going to try paste a link to a copy of this paper in the chat now, in case this is a text you might like to visit with later, and to offer an echo of this talk, that may carry on beyond this space-time.
http://bit.ly/co-becoming-bawaka
But let me leave that thread for now, for while I have been blundering, some of you have been contributing descriptive writing, so let me pay attention to your offerings now: [Read elements from the chat] Thank you for those words.
And I’d like to introduce another score for listening, [SLIDE] shifting our attention to the idea we are continually co-becoming. I would like us to think together about change and flux can how shifting dynamics over time open new possibilities for co-authoring. Over the time that we are together - if you notice sounds appearing and disappearing, and as these variances draw your attention, I would like to invite you to share a description of emergent sonic presences or absences by again contributing descriptions to the chat. Let me model this…
[SLIDE] Often at this point when I am giving a talk, some people seem to begin to wonder about the meandering path of my offerings. Actually, this uncertain path is a deliberate choice, a consequence of my experimental embrace of blundering, where blundering means to stumble blindly. [SLIDE] Blundering is a method that I have been working with to counter the pervasive cultural metanarrative of blindness as metaphorically synonymous with ignorance, or lack of awareness, the opposite of enlightenment. Think here of the blind spot. Or of a description of someone as blind drunk.
Indeed, the rhetorical deployment of blindness as a descriptor of a lack of knowledge litters the art theoretical canon, and contemporary writings. Like Michael Fried's description of blindness as "an exemplary mode of obliviousness.”
A perpetual challenge of my project is to proceed in a field deeply conditioned to pejorative deployment of blindness – a field that, to invert Fried, is often oblivious to sedimented habits within exhibition-making that privilege ocularnormative bodies, that systematically are unwelcoming to blind conversations, and in doing so, a field that encloses and limits questions and possibilities for critical discovery and institutional transformation.
It’s probably a useful moment to clarify my definition of blindness… describes a complex array of perceptual orientations that, to a radical extent, make tangible the limits of normative constructs of vision, and destabilise 20/20 visual cultural paradigms…
[SLIDE]
For me, blundering is a method to reclaim the agency of blindness:
- A performative method for structuring and unstructuring movement improvisations, for handling uncertainty and unanticipated hazards, for navigating ephemerality and concealment.
- And blundering also offers a method for writing and lecturing: inviting the narrative body to stumble blindly in search of story, accepting that sometimes the trail will peter out. Sometimes I might lose my way, I might need to pivot to repace steps, [SLIDE] to pause, to hold a word or phrase, to grasp the contours of objects and subjects – and the absences, the exclusions, to listen for resonances or dissonances, to locate critical echoes; [SLIDE] to cultivate sensory wayfinding of precarious space. [SLIDE]
Before I go on, let me note a debt to artists from varying critical positions who have preceded me, who have provided models for recalibrating relationships between exhibitions and audience; Indigenous artists, black artists, queer artists, feminist artists and others who have challenged – and continue to challenge - the contours of artistic participation within prevailing institutional ecologies, whether by inciting radical closure of space, or carrying out a more gentle insurrection.
——
As well as working with the idea of blundering, other concepts I am evolving work from through blindness include be-holding, myopic reading, wayfinding, re-locating echoes, hallucinating. Let me touch lightly on a couple of these, and give a few examples from my practice.
The etymological root of beholding is the Old English, bihalden. Bihalhen is a conjoining of bi-‘thoroughly’ and -halden ‘to guard, to preserve, to maintain, to take care’. Thus the hyphenated be-holding implies close attention, [SLIDE] by thoroughly handling, holding, taking care. I’ve been working with ways of intensifying be-holding by inviting private encounters that operate outside or at the margins of public exhibitions, when a gallery is closed, or before an exhibition opens, [SLIDE] or in collections warehouses, or conservation workrooms, such as my work with conservators at SFMOMA.
[SLIDE] Another idea I have been working with is re-locating echoes. I’ll flip out of my slides now, and blunder through some of my websites. I’ll pop a link to one of these in the chat, which re-locates the echoes of an ascending encounter with a work of Bill Fontana’s, Sonic Shadows
https://relocatingechoes.space/sonic-shadows
[SLIDE] Hallucinatory recall is a concept I’ve been working on with master printmaker Trent Walter who runs Negative Press in Melbourne. Our first project involved creating a series of tactile screenprints from a single photographic still taken during a private holding encounter.
This was the context of the encounter
https://fayendevie.com/fromonebodytoanother
I took one still image from the night, and with Trent, created twelve unique debossed prints
https://fayendevie.com/janaleen-sings-and-hides-2017
that involved different experiments in modulating colour in an effort to induce hallucinatory affect, to privilege tactility in performative readings, and disrupt visual stability and certainty.
Hallucinatory readings is also an idea that I’ve been working with dancer Benjamin Hancock on, as we continue our experiments in developing a form of vibrational poetics, embodied typographies, and as I continue my work in thinking about publishing for post-human audiences.
https://fayendevie.com/dust-castlemaine-gaol
____
I want to close by turning to some more recent thoughts, ideas that are just emerging.
Here in regional Victoria, the stay at home orders have now lifted, but I have decided to continue to guard my solitude, and to be careful about my decisions about when to leave this valley. Despite the mental health challenges of Covid, I’ve clarified my affinity for time alone, and for the health and economic and time gains of staying close to home, and the conceptual and methodological gains of isolation that I feel I'm just starting to get a handle on.
To be isolated physically over these past months has not meant a lack of conversation or connection. In part this is because many of my collaborators were isolated before CoVid, and will be isolated after, whether due to parenting or caring responsibilities, or living remotely, or disability or chronic illness.
Let me call attention here to a new connection, Hanna Cormick, an artist whose exquisite crafting of performance, and movement and language has recently come into my orbit, and captivated me. Hannah mostly creates within her home that is immunosafe, as she lives with a trifecta of rare genetic disorders that render many of the pollutants of human habitation as extreme immunologic threats.
Earlier this week, Hanna was talking with me about how when you are chronically ill, most interactions with people must be virtual, and these interactions tends to be highly intimate; conversations that take place while lying in bed, or on the bathroom floor, conversations that can be of an extremely personal in nature. Hannah suggested that the layers of intimacy are heightened by the close cropped zoom window, the way such portals tend to connects one private space to another private space. We talked about how we might be able go deeper into understanding the nuanced potential of working with these intimacies, and ways of connecting with audiences when bodies are physically separated but virtually close.
This kind of collaborative work is not about a responsive making-do during Covid. It's not a folly to try while normative society happens to be isolated as well. It's a longer term commitment to
foster the conceptual and methodological discoveries that isolation implicates. A commitment to embrace the collaborative potential that opens up with virtual and dematerialised works, and also the audience possibilities that open up with virtual and dematerialised distribution.
Let me close with an offering of a work that I recently released this vein. It is a new release from my publishing imprint 3-ply, a collaboration with blind percussionist Tommy Carroll, who is based in Chicago. Tommy and I know one another only virtually, through SoVISA, the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists. One day about a month ago, he mentioned on Facebook post that his screenreader had lately been reading “braille dot, braille dot braille dot” in a lot of people’s posts. We realised it was from the Instagram habit of using a fullstop to force a paragraph break, and the screenreader was interpreting each fullstop as a braille dot Braille dot. This led me to think about publications that are designed for a screenreader, and I asked Tommy if he would be up for creating such a publication, and to especially think about how punctuation is voiced. Rather than playing an excerpt, I will leave as a closing gift a link to the free pdf, which you can download and listen to if you are interested.
bit.ly/per-cuss-uation
Any smartphone or computer these days will have a VoiceOver feature you can turn on to listen, and each screenreader will approach the text differently. As Tommy wrote in his notes about it:
“ In what you are about to experience, I have tried to use my abilities as a drummer, composer and screenreader user to arrange the sounds of malfunction I frequently experience into a pseudo-musical form. You will (hopefully) experience rhythms and dare I say a bit of structure (or at least a collection of motifs), but most definitely you will hear the sound of a screenreader struggling to keep up with something designed to trick it.“
QUESTION - Collectives and community
CLOSING
In parting,
Ngā whakawhetai mō tēnei manaakitanga
I give thanks for your kindness,
in listening today.
Noho Ora Mai
Stay well.