Materiality  

Catherine Dormor Towards an Ethics of Violence: material and physical incursions

Within contemporary discourses, there is an increasingly strong call for an ethics of care, privileging compassion, forebearance and generosity. However, these discourses do not address notions of violence and how material and physical acts of violent interruption can be sited within the broader concept of care. An ethics of violence draws from Judith Butler’s introductory essay in Vulnerability in Resistance (2016) in which she questions assumptions that vulnerability and resistance are mutually oppositional. She continues to discuss ways in which vulnerability becomes projected onto another often under the guise of protection. This projection, taken as an assumption of power, becomes an act of aggression or violence toward the agency of the one deemed to be in need of protection. In this performative presentation, we want to propose an ethics of violence which engages material and physical incursions based around the cut and the stitch. As the cut slices through it ruptures surface and structure, freeing the parts from their stabilising frameworks and guiding structures. Similarly, as needle and thread pass through cloth, first the tip, then the shaft, followed by eye and thread, are forced through, expanding the gap. Where the cut is abrupt, the stitch is persistent. Taken from textile practices, these two actions will be deployed methodologically and performatively to navigate and negotiate the role that strategies of violence within care-ful politics can play.

Natalia Aguilar Vásquez The Animation of Houses: (Re)thinking Habitation in Colombia’s Violent Context

In the installation Nóctulo (2015) by Colombian artist Clemencia Echeverri the spectator walks into a black room finding four screens where different videos are being projected into. The screens form a cube but shortly after one realizes they are also the walls of a house. The darkness of the exhibition space contrasts with the high frequencies of pitching sounds that penetrate the visitor’s ear: we hear the presence of a colony of bats in an abandoned house. Parallelly, in the novel Un mundo huérfano (2016) by writer Giuseppe Caputo a father and a son have to live in an empty house while bodies are being dismembered right next door. Somehow, they remain hopeful of a better future and constantly rethink their house not only as a shelter but also as a source of aesthetic pleasure and financial survival. My research considers contemporary Colombian art and literature as critical artifacts to understand the material and affective consequences of decades of political violence in rural areas. I address how these two cases invite us to reconsider what I call “the afterlife of houses”: intimate spaces as ruins of trauma, memory preservation centers, and important places to nest new forms of human and non-human lives. By focusing on the aesthetic portrayal of these spaces—especially in their sonic enhancement—such works offer a new perspective of “being in common” and of thinking rehabilitation during and after surviving the violence of guerrillas, drug cartels, and paramilitary groups. Following the ideas of Ana Maria Ochoa and Brandon LaBelle, I explore the acoustic dimension of the works to understand the shift in sensorial perspectives and memorialization practices in Colombia’s art and landscape. I also engage with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage to redefine home as a locus for present and past, human and non-human encounters.

Erik Dæhlin  from the Hinterland Archives

As a part of my artistic research project “Memory as Material”, I recently did a major artistic exploration of an archive stemming from the Norwegian adventurer, organist, composer, musicologist and eventually “race researcher” Christian Leden. The material consists of hundred-year-old sound recordings, films and photographs from i.a. Greenland, Norway and Alberta.

In “from the Hinterland Archives”, I will try to look at this project in the rearview mirror, turning my back to the future as much as to the past. The artistic investigations will appear at the same time as questions related to my artistic gaze and position, the alleged openness of the arts and the ideological currents of the disciplines, gets thematize. At a latent crossroads, where I enter the currents of Nazi ideology, while activating post-colonial issues, I will try to evoke paradoxes and dilemmas in the material and the artistic search and production.

“Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations” – Bourriaud N., trans by Pleasance S., and Woods F., with Copeland M. Relational Aesthetics. les presses du réel 2002 (for the English translation) p.22. Thanksgiving Dinner Party is an installation and participatory artwork created from and embedded with materials of US domestic and international violence: 13 placemats of military uniforms worn by US female soldiers in Afghanistan, painted with scenes from San Francisco Bay area where the artist was born. Paints were made of ground Afghan lapis lazuli, lead, and bone black. Cutlery used by participants was created from UXO dropped by US military planes during the US’s secret war on Laos. The table is covered with stamped pages and visas from the artist’s expired US passports. While US Thanksgiving purports to be a ritual of gratitude to indigenous people of the Americas, it is essentially a celebration of their genocide. The artwork is designed to be sensual for diners: sliding chopsticks between one’s lips, the black Kevlar napkins shimmer as they slip across fingers and mouths and disintegrate after a single meal, edges frayed. Food and wine are spilled, chosen for their colors (pumpkin soup, red wine, green beans, cranberries), their reference to the North American celebration and ability to stain the artwork, designed for desecration. The trial of this dinner/performance was held in Hong Kong two months before the city then our world shut down due to Covid-19. I propose to give a virtual illustrated artist’s talk while dining with the artwork: a brief activation of part of the installation. The solitariness a contrast to the original intent of the work, a reflection of our time.

Paulo Luís Almeida, Mário Bismarck, Sílvia Simões THE VIOLENCE OF SPACE: A DRAWING-BASED APPROACH TO VIOLENCE BETWEEN BODY AND SITE

The ubiquity of violence in different strands of human action stresses the fact that violence is more than a repressive process. It is bound to the opening of creative possibilities. As a nexal concept, violence also acts as a lens to inquire about other processes. This paper explores the relationship between violence and material thinking in drawing practices. Arguing from a phenomenological understanding of drawing as tracing/retracing, we discuss violence as metaphor for the intensity of relationships between human and their surrounding spaces, within two drawing-based projects. How is violence embedded in historical and contemporary drawing practices? How the dynamic nature of violence underlies the experiences of the drawers’ body in relation to natural and architectural sites? These questions are intertwined in two approaches. Our first approach investigates the constitutive violence of drawing as reflected in language. Drawing’s vocabulary reflects violence as the realm of means to a just or unjust end, in relation to normative concepts stemming from material labour, law and moral, e.g. reserve and regret (pentimento). This vocabulary frames and informs our apprehension of drawing and is borderline zones in contemporary art. Framed by Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, our second approach embodies material thinking within two drawing-based projects, responding to violent changes in geographic and architectural sites. In a reflective review, we discuss the experience of drawing as a material re-enactment of the eruption of “The Father”, the local name for the volcano of Fogo, in Cape Verde. This re-enactment structures violence not as an image, but as a deferred action, transferring it to drawing media and display strategies. Following Bernard Tschumi’s notion of architecture as body-space violence, we reflect on the performative and material strategies used to relate the body to an abandoned industrial site, restoring the vital bond with the building that the industrial architecture has suspended. REFERENCES Benjamin, Walter (1996). ‘Critique of Violence’. In Selected Writings. Volume 1 1913-1926 Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 236-252. Damisch, Hubert (1995). Traité du Trait. Paris: Reunión des musées nationaux. Derrida, Jacques (1990). Memoires d’Aveugle – L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Reunión des musées nationaux. Dickson, Lisa; Romanets, Maryna (eds). (2014). Beauty, Violence, Representation. New York: Routledge. Rae, Gavin; Ingala, Emma (eds.) (2019). The Meanings of Violence. From Critical Theory to Biopolitics. New York: Routledge. Tschumi, Bernard (1996). Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, MIT Press. Petherbridge, Deanna (2010). The Primacy of Drawing – Histories and Theories of Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Khabat Abas The Bombshell Cello 

This is an experimental music performance with a new cello which I created out of a bombshell that I found in the bazaar of Sulaymaniyah city (Iraq). War Create a new knowledge to the sound and musical instrument and attempt to create the situation for the different practice and generate different way of having objective reality. Therefore, I am interested in creating sounds of those instrument that is not capable as a musical instrument in the western sense of music instrument. From this point of view material has a considerable role to play in this concept, which involves a ‘dance’ between material and performer, both have agency in their capacity to respond and agree with or resist one another. Thus, material agency places the performer in the position of negotiating and redirect by the material to new performative processes and new technique. Therefore, technique in this context is a concrete possibility offered by the material world, in order to cross the border and broaden sonic possibilities.

Alec Hall Zombie Wagnerism: The Music of America’s Endless State of War

Sound is a physical force with material properties, and it is also a literary code, a text to be deciphered. Expressed in music, the re-presentation of violence occurs when these two dimensions approach and exceed their limits. Neoliberal economics have stripped all and everything bare; whatever might have been off-limits from capital extraction has been forced into the transactional economy. In the USA at least, nothing remains free from the spectre of making money. Violence is everywhere and yet also nowhere; the force of capital relationships surrounds all of us without reprieve in its completely invisible but always palpable way. Like sound, we experience both the material force of it, as well as a text to be read. One outcome from this half-century long transformation is the disappearance of subtlety and its replacement by the paradigm of what Rem Koolhaas calls “the theory of the large”. Within the frame of Bigness, music has found its aesthetic apex in the form of blockbuster film scores, characterized primarily by a martial affect on the literary plane and overwhelming volume in the physical dimension. Looking briefly at the music of Hans Zimmer and his protégé, the Swedish composer Lüdwig Goransson as they connect to American poet Amanda Gorman and the US economic establishment, I will show how these two dimensions of sound—the material and the symbolic—express how American violence operates similarly, as both real and virtual forces. Subjects of neoliberal regimes experience the physical violence perpetrated by state governments, as well as the symbolic, intangible violence as practiced by the corporate government. I will then show two examples of my own work as it relates to these kinds of violence, taking shape in one of two modes, either as catharsis or as satire.

Niamh Fahy Violent Impressions- an investigation of slow violence through a multidisciplinary printmaking practice

The human actions that create waste and initiate slow violence do not climax with the death and destruction of environment. Other-than-human life will continually and non-coherently assert agency over the future forms and adaptions of that waste (Hird and Yusoff, 2019). This extends to my own inquiry as a print artist, investigating how slow violence reverberates and proliferates across landscapes and bodies. Through creating narratives that challenge and make permeable the boundaries between landscape, human and non-human life, we can radically reimagine our relationships to other forms of life and reflect on the hierarchical structure that limits our imagination. Within this paper, I will present a series of hybrid print works situated in practice-based research that attempt to confront and weave the co-existing tensions and interdependence that overlap in a landscape inhabited by multiple histories, temporalities, voices and narratives. Through negotiating a combined methodology of fieldwork and studio practice I reflect on how the interruptive force of slow violence can be reimagined through the haptic nature of the printed surface, without repeating the imagery of landscape as a stratified stage or background that hosts the folly of human actors (Hird and Yusoff, 2019). The printed image emerges from the act of creating pressure, impressing, pushing and rubbing the matrix in order to reflect the details on the surface of the plate. Through attention to the indexical marks, traces and deep recesses within landscape we can become intimately engaged with the cyclical unfolding of a violence that extends from the human hand to the land we impress, slowly finding its way back to inhabit the very fascia of our bodies. This research aims to reconstruct violent narratives through a multidisciplinary print practice that attends to the microbial, imperceptible and disguised relations within landscape.

In a collaborative interdisciplinary enquiry including performance, video, sound collage and making, we stitch seams of new fashion languages about the (past)-now-here. We seek, seemingly, the regenerative intentions of recuperation after violence. The continuous colonial project never cleans up after itself, after its violence. Likened to the aftermaths of tailoring, the process leaves shrapnels, detritus, cannon shells, broken cultures, cuts. Fragments get left behind … We draw in the deconstructive making of fashion disruptors Xuly Bet, Themba Mngomezulu (Darkie), Rei Kawakubo, Dapper Dan and vagabond patchwork tailors, and follow a conceptual genealogy of the materialised violations of fashion’s [western] conventions. Things are discarded and sent to the floor. Offcuts. Cut off from the whole, from peoples, from practices, from markets. Cut-off sites are the echo chambers of unclaimed memories. The offcuts act as cultural oddments, a residuum, relics and vestiges of dreams. Through sonic suturing of voice, dialects, bits of time, memories and other ways of wearing – of cloth as clothes – we explore, collect, stitch, overlay/overlap these cuttings into new remembrances of shapes/spaces. Picked up, pieced together [repurposed] and presented anew, as another set of propositions, fashion’s inner-outer violence creates the generative play/possibilities for seeking terms and forms sufficient for these reformations and articulations. Scripting the algorithms of an audacious glossary of terms for fashion. Cutting Re-cut Uncut Cut up Cross-cut The joins or seams are the hybrid processes of bringing multiple things/ideas together. Multiple ways of seams. Joining the outskirts with the centre. Stitching sentences, punctuating bodies. In the return, fashion as we redefine its use, finds its possible future-forgotten vernacular/s. *Our title draws on the writings of fashion poet (Gaurav Monga, 2021)

Rebecca Simons Letters from the Past

An uncomfortable encounter between granddaughter and grandfather brings long forgotten memories to the surface. Disgust, denial, anger and forgiveness, the confrontation with the past sends shockwaves through the family. Grandpa is a pervert, but is he just that? The multimedia project Letters from the Past by Rebecca Simons tells a nuanced story of sexual abuse within the family. The project consisting of three different elements: Exhibition 2. Documentary 3. Educational workshops These three elements can be used as a whole, individually or in any combination. www.lettersfromthepast.nl Letters from the Past looks at how to tell the story about sexual abuse without focusing on the abuse itself. In the exhibition and film the viewer is confronted with the complex feelings and dilemmas that the family members face. It takes us on a journey in the now, with interviews and questions between the artist and her family, in combination with images, love letters and the story of the past between the man that once was a charming young man and the love for the woman that would become Rebecca’s grandmother. The juxtaposed stories allow the viewer to slowly take in and reflect on the complex feelings that abuse brings forward, questioning how to re-shape memories and restructure the family story. Sexual abuse of children is mostly conducted by someone in the child’s close surrounding, a relative, family friend or neighbour. An estimated 90 % of all the cases are never reported to the authorities. Fear, shame, guilt and loyalty towards the abuser often stops the child from speaking out. The project Letters from the Past aims to create a platform where sexual violence, taboos and family struggles can be discussed.

Carolina Rito On Translations and Epistemic Violences

The semiotic function of translation has been the site of tensions between the thrive for clarity and its key role in the establishment of Western epistemic superiority. A number of postcolonial theorists, including Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant and Mexican sociologist Rolando Vázquez, have reasoned about the epistemic violence in translation and how the imperative of clarity and transparency preserves one world view to which others would have to make themselves translatable, if they are to resist erasure. (Glissant, 2010; Vázquez, 2011) On Translations and Epistemic Violences focuses on the conceptualization of the in-between spaces of translation as a site of semiotic struggle and transaction. This struggle is inscribed and enacted in the radical impossibility of a neutral equivalence between semiotic codes; in the struggle against the instrumentality of meanings; and in the struggle for a subjectivity otherwise. (Muñoz, 2020) This presentation is part of a curatorial enquiry on the aesthetics and political affordances of translation beyond the ontological binary and equivalence of linguistic translation—as such, it is a project on the epistemic violences of erasure.By conceptualizing translation without the original and the copy, this project stages translation’s epistemic function in confusion and hesitation. The project proposes that these characteristics are deployed as a curatorial methodology in the exploration of practices that aim to map out aesthetic and semiotic materialities beyond the ontological dualism of original/copy, authentic/surrogate, text/translation. This curatorial enquiry proposes a juxtaposition of Sara Maldoror’s film Sambizanga (1972); the transatlantic journeys of Wally Salomão and the linguistic frays of Algaravias: Echo Chambers (2016); the embodied criticality of Spivak’s translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976); the multi-lingual reading-performance by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi; and the network of anti-colonial solidarities in African liberation movements in the 20th century. This visual-discursive presentation explores radical interdependencies between seemingly unrelated materials and generative opacities in its making-public.

Monica Neiman Sotomayor Corresponding Conditions – The Female Body – Experience and Materiality

The contemporary body exists as both object and subject. In this manner, we all experience pain, violence, oppression and opposition as a result of historical, societal, cultural, political and gendered structures in place around the world. The largest of human organs, the skin, can be visualised as a boundary, a self-defining limit, the point of exchange, maintenance and protection, equipped to mask and conceal, to sense and be sensed, a surface, a canvas, wholly unique and personal. The corporeal skin can be articulated visually as a mirror/screen, a gateway to the psyche, thereby redefining it beyond that of mere topography. Skin as metaphor for female embodiment and experience allows for the productive exploration of meaning, from the individual experience to a collective one; where one’s experience can resonate with and be carried forward by another. The results are implicit rather than explicit, focusing objective attention to the subject, and to the abstraction. A metaphorical skin can visually articulate permanence, impermanence, what may no longer be there, but also what may come to be. It is the single physical point where duration can live, where a past memory can exist in the present, and into the future. In this workshop, a visual language will emerge from the collaboration between the artist [myself] and the subject [workshop participants], whereby the mirrored feedback helps to reveal the varied layers and nature of the metaphorical armoured skin. The collaboration with the participant offers insight into how a human being can carry in body and mind the violence, pain, suffering or trauma perpetrated upon them. Are these internalised or externalised, unbearably invisible or unbearably visible, suffocatingly silenced or suffocatingly exposed? The PARSE Research Conference presents a valuable collaborative opportunity to further articulate, visualise and construct the narratives of female embodiment and experience.