Project: From Where I Stand I can See You

I have been invited to be a ‘Seer-in-Residence’ as part of a project in development called From Where I Stand I can See You which brings together the practices of UK based artist Traci Kelly and Norway based Rita Marhaug. A number of Seers-in-Residence will be involved in responding to Kelly’s component within this project, addressing her work through the specific prism of his or her own practice and interests. An initial conversation with Kelly suggests potential for exploring ideas emerging from the terms ellipsis and eclipse. More to follow soon.

Project: Dumb Fixity

Over the next year, I am planning to work with artists McCormack+Gent in relation to their ongoing project, Dumb Fixity, with the view to (hopefully) developing some new writing.  

“Dumb Fixity arose from a desire to measure an abstract set of phenomena, working on the premise that things can speak and to find a means of hearing what they are telling us. The first question was how we could negate the subjective interpretations of our human perspective, if we could transcend our human desire to name, label, and categorise matter and meaning. 

The answer was that it is impossible: there is no avoiding our disadvantaged position of being human; we cannot escape comprehending and defining the world through our language. How then do we hear a shared language of the mountain, the fox or the lamp? We had to take another tack. This investigation is a process of fixity, an attempt to plot the proximities, connections, and allegiances of things, and trace the associations of their auras.” McCormack+Gent

Research: Practices for Thinking (Oneself) Differently

“You see, that’s why I really work like a dog, and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing, because my problem is my own transformation […] This transformation of oneself by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to an aesthetic experience”. Michel Foucault, ‘An Interview by Stephen Riggins’, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1, (ed.) Paul Rabinow, (New York, The New Press, 1997), p.131.

Developing some of the ideas generated within recent projects and publications, I am currently working on a new phase of research which explores the triangulation of (A) certain philosophies of subjectivity (the concept of ‘making life into a work of art’); (B) various tactical practices (affective, embodied ‘ways of operating’ drawn largely from contemporary art contexts) and (C) reflections on the knowledge(s) produced therein (specifically an exploration of techné).  I am interested in approaching the (art) research process as an affirmative practice for thinking (oneself) differently, thinking about certain forms of artistic research and practice as ‘tactics’ or ‘ways of operating’ for producing a critical form of subjectivity, part of a wider process of subjectivization. Purposefully shifting from thinking of research as determined within and by the (narrow) terms of an academic ‘project’ (perhaps as defined by the more instrumentalized and commodified conceptualizations of research within academia) I want to develop an understanding of the research process as a live and lived enquiry, considering it in analogous terms to or as a manifestation of the philosophical project of ‘making life into a work of art’ (Foucault). My intent is to move from viewing research as the teleological pursuit of knowledge, a linear and outcome-driven process catalyzed by the identification of questions to which conclusions are subsequently sought. Instead, I will consider research as an expression of ‘conatus’ (Spinoza) or of the ‘enquiring of the enquirer (Badiou) where the search or striving of its endeavor (rather than its outputs or contribution to knowledge) is recuperated critical value. Here, a subject is not what is studied at a distance but rather what is performed or enacted through the research itself.'   
  
Over the next year or so, I will be exploring projects and collaborations which help to interrogate these concerns further. More on this to follow soon.

Seminar: Performing Space (Differently)

I have been invited to deliver a seminar in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield as part of their PhD research and design programme. Drawing on some of my recent projects and collaborations, I envisage this seminar will explore 2 clusters of activity within my current research which explore various 'tactics' for performing space differently (to expectation, convention or habit):

Image: Emma Cocker, Spatial (inter) relations proposition, Vienna, 2011

Performing Communities: interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions in the public realm can help cultivate models of social agency, sociability or temporary collectivity, in resistance to the increased experience of atomization/individualization within contemporary urban life. It investigates the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing and testing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of individual and collective subjectivity. Central to this area of enquiry are my own practice-based collaborations with other artists: including the project Open City; a dialogue between myself, Sara Wookey and Bianca Scliar Mancini following the projects (Un)folding Zagreb (2009) and Movement in the City (Toronto, 2010); and a recent project entitled Spatial (Inter) Relations in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and students at the Institute for Transmedia Art, Vienna where sight-lines (or the practice of ‘throwing a glance’) were interrogated as forms of performative drawing for demarcating (even constituting) temporary forms of collectivity.

Cartographies of Escape: focuses on the relationship between how landscape is lived or performed to the emergence of a critical – resistant – form of subjectivity. It investigates how artistic practice can offer a platform for practicing or rehearsing alternative ‘ways of operating’ to the increasingly limited, prescriptive templates of citizenship perpetuated by and within contemporary neoliberalism. Central to this research cluster are the two prose poems The Yes of the No! (produced as part of the project Summer of Dissent) and Making Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins, in Manual for Marginal Places. 

Publication: occursus - Dis/con/sensus

I am contributing a text to the forthcoming occursus publication –  a collection of responses by artists, writers and researchers to certain themes which emerged in the course of the last series of occursus’ Reading Loop. The book will be divided into themes; these are: ‘Spandrels’, ‘Re-visiting’, ‘Dis/con/sensus’, ‘Copying’, ‘Foam’ and ‘Animality’. My text will be included in the section 'Dis/con/sensus’ edited by Amanda Crawley-Jackson.

Amanda's introduction to the section reads as follows:

“Politics is litigious. It is a deviation from the normal order of things. It is a denaturalising gesture, a rupture and an interruption. (See Jacques Rancière, Dissensus).

Politics is dissensus. Consensus is the loss of thought. It is politics understood as the affair of government. The futility of noisy protests that everyone agrees with…? (That leads to more consensus.) Art as a means of disclosing the ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’ as contingent? (See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 16). The denaturalising function of art. What constitutes consensus and dissent today? In what forms are they practised? What kinds of sociality do they entail? Doing is a torrent against all enclosure. Our power to do things differently, our power to create a different world, is a flow that exerts a growing force against the walls that hem us in, a constant breaching of these walls. Capital runs around mending these breaches (granting land reforms, redefining the norms of sexuality, for example), but the flow of our power will not be contained, simply because our collective life depends on it. (John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p. 261). What are the links between art and politics? Is art (and can it be) political? Does it do? What is the place of the university? Is the university a consenting or dissenting institution?

dissent (vb): early 15c., from L. dissentire ”differ in sentiments, disagree, be at odds, contradict, quarrel,” from dis- ”differently” (see dis-) + sentire ”to feel, think” (seesense). Related: Dissented; dissenting.

dissension (n): early 14c., from O.Fr. dissension (12c.) and directly from L. dissensionem (nom. dissensio) “disagreement, difference of opinion, discord, strife,” noun of action from pp. stem of dissentire ”disagree”

consensus (n): 1854 as a term in physiology; 1861 of persons; from L. consensus ”agreement, accord,” pp. of consentire (see consent). There is an isolated instance of the word from 1633.” 

Event: Spike Associates

Artist Katie Davies in her studio. Photograph: Stuart Whipps.

I have been invited by Spike Associates to lead a critical discussion around an exhibition of new work by artist Katie Davies, at Motorcade/Flashparade, an independently run gallery in Bristol. I have worked with Katie previously, as part of her residency at the town hall in Sheffield, which resulted in my production of the text, The Shimmering of the Tipping Point. Central to this text, and to Katie’s work more broadly, are ideas around liminality, the notion of the artist as initiate, and a focus on specific communities inhabiting particular kinds of threshold state or space.

Background to Katie’s practice: ‘Exploring observational documentary narrative, Katie Davies works by establishing professional associations to institutions and individuals in order to critique the relationship between the individual and the system within which they operate. Davies is at times part and not part of the groups featured in her work. Her practice often seems to point to or reflect upon the idea of a threshold, examining the nature of the indistinguishable zones and in-between states, or on spaces that are in some way betwixt.’ See http://www.katiedavies.com/

Publication: Power

I have two texts in the forthcoming issue of DRAIN magazine on Power, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2011

Yoko Ono, Fly Piece, 1963.

Permission Granted: This text is a reflective meditation on the power of a form of invitational yes that can be witnessed at play within certain art practices; an interruptive and potentially dissident species of affirmation that has a specifically inceptive function, for provoking a form of thinking and being differently. Permission Granted extends the ideas of a short pamphlet, ‘The Yes of the No!’, that I produced following a writing residency at the artist-led project Plan 9 in Bristol, during their Summer of Dissent, 2009. The original text of ‘The Yes of the No!’ is also being published in this issue of Drain.

Power: This issue of Drain attempts to expose the cultural faciality of power, as well as manifestations of power as simulacra, which obfuscate traditional inquiries into its construction. If power connects the virtual and the actual, how does cultural creativity channel or destabilize this connectivity? The corporate-academic-entertainment-military-industrial complex and its front-end, the global information machine floods us with images, and images of images, to cause sensory overload, and yet at the same time, acute sensory deprivation. Most of all, power entrenches a visual literacy that allows us to see only its style, leaving us unable to access other ways of seeing and becoming. How can we parody this visual literacy, and the speed, cadence and grammar of this power and its affects? If the simulation of power is necessary and absolute, can creative acts and molecular politics slip through the surveillance and desensitizing of territorializing systems?

IN THIS ISSUE

Feature Essay
The Clutter Assemblage – Ian Buchanan

Essays
Permission Granted – Emma Cocker
CLEAN – Looking at War – Chris Revelle

Reviews/Interviews
Interview with Andy Roche, ‘On Psychedelia’ – Alexander Stewart
Interview with Blazo Kovacevic – Bertha Husband

Creative Writing
Paper Army – Camille Meyer
Power/Collaboration – BT Shaw and Elizabeth Lopeman
Great North – Vanessa Norton
The Yes of the No! – Emma Cocker
Cross Cultural Exchanges in Imperial and Global India – Morgan Campbell

Feature Artist
Necropolis – Roi Kuper

Art Projects
GWOTEM – Jamie Badoud
Duration – Diana Heise
Criminals (Rio de Janeiro) – Cyrico Lopes
Clean Battlefield – Bob Paris
The Gift of Giving – Oscar Perez

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis (Part 1)

DRAWING ON DRAWING A HYPOTHESIS

A performance lecture by Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker

M HKA, Antwerp, 22 September 2010

On the occasion of the launch of Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Research (Springer Verlag, 2011) Nikolaus Gansterer in collaboration with writer Emma Cocker present a performance lecture that draws on the publication. Using processes of cross-reading and live drawing, their performance lecture approaches the publication as a reader might thumb through a book; where certain sections appear to be lingered over, while others are skimmed in the search for key words and phrases, evocative fragments and extractions. Their reading suggests that books like Drawing a Hypothesis might not always need be read in a linear or logical way, but rather are to be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions within the event of reading itself. The lecture takes the figures of thought at the heart of Drawing a Hypothesis as points of departure for exploring and performing the correlations between thinking and drawing. Addressing the shifting and ambivalent properties of image, symbol and drawing within the publication, it asks, ‘how can these visual artefacts be comprehended?’

More images can be found here. Forthcoming launches and performance lectures will be taking place in Amsterdam, Vienna and Berlin. A video document of the work is also in development.

Book Launch: The Event

Excerpt from my essay, [...]

As part of THE EVENT in Birmingham, Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry will be launching their new publication alongside the opening of the group exhibition “which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together?”. The publication (developed in response to a series of evolving solo commissions by Kihlberg Henry, produced by VIVID in collaboration with Danielle Arnaud and Artsway) includes texts by Emma Cocker, Brian Dillon and Mladen Dolar. 

Writing: Still Square to the Round Hole

I will be visiting Spike Island in November with the view to writing something about the forthcoming exhibition, Tea Back, by Łódź based artist Cezary Bodzianowski. I hope that the encounter will enable me to revisit and develop some of the concerns developed within my recent texts, Over and Over, Again and Again, (where a specifically Sisyphean model of absurdity was explored); The Yes of the No! which explored affirmative forms of dissension and refusal (such as over-enthusiasm and play) and writing developed in collaboration with Open City within whose work everyday actions are often repeated, inverted, reversed in order to reveal the presence of habitual social expectations, conventions and protocol.

Cezary Bodzianowski: Tea Back
Saturday 22 October - Sunday 27 November

Spike Island presents the first UK solo show by Łódź based artist Cezary Bodzianowski. Initially trained as a sculptor in both his native Poland and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Bodzianowski has increasingly turned his practice to the creation of absurdist interventions into everyday settings. Such actions include camouflaging himself as foliage while standing beneath a tree or positioning himself, legs in the air, in the empty space below a staircase. In his 2010 essay 'O Lucky Man', art critic Jan Verwoert describes these studiedly deadpan performances as ‘characterised by a certain conspicuous inconspicuousness’, bringing to mind the era of silent comedy with their permanently out of place everyman hero. These actions result in photographs or short videos, mostly taken by his wife and artistic collaborator Monika Chojnicka. At the invitation of Spike Island, Bodzianowski and Chojnicka undertake a short residency during October 2011, responding to the sites and spaces of Bristol, including Spike Island’s own history as a former tea packing factory.

Cezary Bodzianowski, Step by Step (2010). Photo: Monika Chojnicka

Publication: COPY // unfold

My text-work Close Reading (G.D.T.F, 1993) has been selected for inclusion in the forthcoming edition of COPY, a publication of experimental/art writing curated by Critical Writing Collective. COPY explores the boundaries of critical and experimental art writing through the publishing of writing as or within art practice, and page based works with a critical / textual element. COPY // unfold suggests a tension between the resolved and unresolved, drafted and rewritten, finished and unfinished through works which explore, respond to or enact in their own form a state of being ‘in process’.  Contributors include Alain Ayers, David Berridge, Julia Calver, Paul Carr, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Laura Davidson, Joanna Loveday, Flatten the Mountain, Daniel Fogarty, Sarah Frydenlund, Derek Horton, Tamarin Norwood, Flora Robertson, Terry Slater, Richard Taylor, John Winslow, Paul Wright. COPY is designed in collaboration with Dust.

Emma Cocker, Close Reading (G.D. T.F. 1993), 2011

Through the practice of close reading, language can be made to stretch or pucker, ruche or fray. With experience, it can be pulled thin and sheer as delicate gauze or gathered up into thick and impenetrable creases. Close Reading (G.D. T.F. 1993) is part of an ongoing series that investigates the practice of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’ as a critical tool for destabilizing language, for breaking up the linear unfolding of language into discontinuous fragments. Close Reading (G.D. T.F. 1993) performs a close reading of Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, 1993, in an attempt to render the text itself as an unfolding of pleats and stutters.

Publication: Art & Research

My essay ‘Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ has now been published and can be read online here. The article belongs to a cluster of research entitled ‘The Enquiring of the Enquirer’ (within my broader research project, Not Yet There), which considers the specificity of thinking (‘knowing’) generated within certain forms of artistic practice, through the prism of philosopher Alain Badiou’s Being and Event. Central to Badiou’s thesis is an elaboration of the ‘event’ conceived as an encounter with that which cannot be comprehended by the terms of the existing ‘situation’; a moment of rupture wherein the ‘new’ might emerge. My article tests artists Dutton + Swindells’ practice against this theory (and vice versa), proposing their work as a manifestation of a ‘truth procedure’ performed in ‘fidelity’ (Badiou) to the transformative potential of the art encounter and possibility of the unexpected or ‘wildness’ therein. The article develops a new critical vocabulary for considering the process of artistic practice (and knowledge production therein), enhancing the burgeoning discourse around artistic research. It proposes a language for interrogating the criticality of the endeavour or enquiry of art practice, rather than resulting outcomes. A condensed version of the text was also published in ‘The Institute of Beasts’ (Site Gallery, 2011). A parallel investigation exploring drawing as an ‘evental site of practice’ (shifting from Badiou’s writing towards Antonio Negri’s conceptualization of ‘kairos’) is also developing within essays ‘The Restless Line’ in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B.Tauris, 2012) and ‘Distancing the If and Then’, in Drawing a Hypothesis (Verlag Springer, 2011). 

ART&RESEARCH

A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

Volume 4. Number 1. Summer 2011

ISSN 1752-6388

This issue of Art and Research, focused upon ‘Art and Animality’, is co-edited by Ron Broglio (Arizona State University)

Contents include

Editorial: Art and the Animal Revolution

Giovanni Aloi, Different Becomings

Susan McHugh, Stains, Drains, and Automobiles: A Conversation with Steve Baker about Norfolk Roadkill, Mainly

Helen Bullard, Fostering Pidgins:(A conference report on Pidgin Language:(Animals, Birds and Us)

Emma Cocker, Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild

Roz Cran, Am I leopard?: Seeking Animation and Other Possibilities

Alan Currall, Cat Stuck in Organ

Maria Fusco, Fieldnotes from the Urban Pastoral

Ron Broglio and Frederick Young, The Coming Non-Human Community: A Conversation

Ingvild Kaldal and Nigel Rothfels, Reflections on the Vitrine 
Carolee Schneemann, Approaching Animality

Kate Foster in conversation with Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson

Jan Verwoert, Animalisms

Performance: Drawing a Hypothesis Reading

I am currently working on a performance reading of the publication Drawing a Hypothesis (above) in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer, which we are going to present in a number of contexts during the Autumn. The first performance reading will take place on 22 September 2011 within the context of the exhibition, Graphology Chapter 4 at M HKA, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Antwerp.

DRAWING A HYPOTHESIS

A performance lecture by Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker

Nikolaus Gansterer in collaboration with the UK based writer Emma Cocker will present a performance lecture based on the publication, Drawing a Hypothesis. Using processes of cross-reading and live drawing, their performance lecture approaches the publication as a reader might thumb through a book; where certain sections appear to be lingered over, while others are skimmed in the search for key words and phrases, evocative fragments and extractions. Their reading suggests that books like Drawing a Hypothesis might not always need be read in a linear or logical way, but rather are to be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions within the event of reading itself. The lecture takes the figures of thought at the heart of Drawing a Hypothesis as points of departure for exploring and performing the correlations between thinking and drawing. Addressing the shifting and ambivalent properties of image, symbol and drawing within the publication, it asks, ‘how can these visual artefacts be comprehended?’

LONELY AT THE TOP

Graphology Chapter 4

(25.08.2011- 25.09.2011)

GRAPHOLOGY was initiated by Edwin Carels (researcher KASK/HoGent)

In four episodes, Graphology explores the automatisms that may show themselves in drawing. The human hand as a seismograph of the inner life, but also, conversely, the ‘mechanical unconsciousness’ of the machine that thrusts itself on the human eye. Printed reproduction techniques lead a life of their own, but how? A series of exhibitions set at the intersection of drawing, photography, printmaking, film and computer graphics. The fourth episode interprets the cinamätographe, as patented by the brothers Lumière, in the most literal sense: as a graphical method to re-produce, a writing of fragmented light images, a play of analysis and synthesis. Contributors include Juliana Borinski, Marcel Broodthaers, Morgan Fisher, Nikolaus Gansterer, Sandra Gibson / Luis Recoder, Wim Janssen, Louis  Auguste Lumière, Jan Evangelista Purkynä, Man Ray, Dominique Somers.

Publication: Keeping Things Open

I have been working on a text for a publication commissioned by NVA, as part of the dialogue surrounding their redevelopment of the St. Peter's seminary (see images above). The publication draws together discussions and writing coming out of NVA's presentation of the project at the XIIth International Architecture Exhibition at Venice Biennale. NVA were invited by the Scottish Government, in partnership with Creative Scotland and the British Council Scotland, to curate a distinctive Scottish presence at La Biennale di Venezia's 2010 International Architecture Exhibition. They presented public events responding to the themes of restoration and reuse of our build heritage, particularly on the potential restoration of St. Peter's Seminary near Cardross. The invitation to write a text (in relation to this intriguing context) has provided opportunity to explore a specifically  propositional form of writing, which draws together a series of 'abstracts' as different 'ways in' or 'openings' for debating the ruin. Rather than conceiving the text as an essay, I have been exploring the possibility of proposing it as an event (whose details will be elaborated at some future point in time). My plan is to develop more work around some of these concerns in the future: an interest in artists' interventions in architecture or place at the cusp of it becoming ruin has been already tentatively considered within some recent writing (Reuben Henry and Karin Kihlberg's work in relation to the Birmingham Central Library, Sean Edwards interest in the Maelfa shopping centre, and Sophie Mellor's 'urban retreat' in the environs of Barrow-in-Furness.  

On the Ruin’s Future: Keeping Things Open

 A proposition: Located at and provoked by the site of the Grade A listed St Peter’s seminary, a modernist ruin in the heart of the Kilmahew Estate, On the Ruin’s Future: Keeping Things Open is conceived as a discursive event, bringing together different positions and perspectives to question and interrogate the potentiality—as well as the problematic—of the architectural ruin. This event explores the possibility of different openings (and notions of openness), to initiate and invite debate around the ruin and the proposed redevelopment of the St Peter’s site. Presentations will be situated in different geographical locations within St Peter’s (see map for location details); a peripatetic audience will engage with ideas simultaneously to a live encounter with the site. The event will begin as dawn breaks and continue as long as the light lasts and weather permits. Audience may come and go as they wish. 

Proposed 'abstracts' include ➀ The Ruins Look Back; ➁ Being Left Open—Ruin as an Open Structure; ➂ Ruin—The Suspended Potentiality of Narrative Stalled; ⊗ Performing Ruin; ➃ No Longer and Not Yet; ➄ Becoming Cuckoo: How to Preoccupy Site; ➅ Twelve Categories: Classifying the Unclassified and Unclassifiable; ➆ Outside>Inside ➇ Beautiful Brutal: The Curious Lure of ‘Béton Brut’; ➈ The ‘She’ of Ruin; ➉ Open Poetics

To Have and To Hold launches at Edinburgh Book Festival 2011

In late November 2010 NVA curated “To Have and To Hold” at the 12th International Architectural Biennale in Venice. The discussions in Venice formed the basis of this new publication, which launches at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011. 

Creative Director Angus Farquhar will discuss NVA’s hopes for St Peter’s with the architectural historian Edward Hollis and the Glasgow-based architect Gordon Murray, all of whom have contributed to the book. “A Future for St Peter’s Seminary? Saving Scotland’s Masterpiece Of Modern Architecture”, takes place on 13th August, 7pm, RBS Corner Theatre in Charlotte Square Gardens, at the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town. Advanced copies of the book will be available to buy at the launch event while full distribution will be in September. 

Project/Publication: Borderlands

I am going to be working with photographer, Katja Hock, on a project that draws on our shared interest in border spaces. The project reflects specifically on Hock’s recent work around a series of woodland landscapes, based on her childhood memories of an area close to the border between Germany and Holland. It is possible that our collaboration will involve exploring the potentiality of verweilen, tarrying.


Below are some notes / images from from her recent exhibition, Stillness/Silence/Arrangements.

‘Walking through woodlands, returning to already photographed scenes, the photographs allow the viewer to linger, remain, and spend time creating a relationship between the photographs and their own imagination. The eye wanders between the scenes, acknowledging the reappearance of shapes, but they are slightly different than when seen before, reminding of time passed. It is the moments in-between, those voids between perceived time which cannot be shown that form and change memories and constitute the reading of the images. “For the important thing for the remembering author” as Benjamin remarks, “is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? (1)” (1). Benjamin, W, The Image of Proust in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt, Fontana Press, London, 1992, pp.197-210, p198

'Every site is haunted by countless ghosts that lurk there in silence, to be evoked or not. These absences stimulate the imagination, encouraging the viewer to fill in the blank spaces in the landscape.' Kraenzle, C., “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography, and the Imaginative”, in Searching for Sebald, ed. Patt. L, The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles, 2007, pp.126-145, p.138

'Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire temporal course. Compared to photography, memory’s records are full of gaps. […] Memory does not pay much attention to dates – it skips years or stretches temporal distance. […] No matter which scenes an individual remembers, they all mean something relevant to that person, though he or she might not necessarily know what they mean. Thus, they are organized according to a principle which is essentially different from the organizing principle of photography. Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representation.' Kracauer, S, “Photography” in The Mass Ornament, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1995, pp.46-63, p.50.

'When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousand of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Hansel said to Gretel: “We shall soon find the way,” but they did not find it. They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest, and were very hungry, for they had nothing to eat but two or three berries, which grew on the ground. And as they were so weary that their legs would carry them no longer, they lay down beneath a tree and fell asleep.’ Brothers Grimm, Complete Fairy Tales, Routledge, London, 2002, p.69

Screening: I AM NOT A POET

My short video, Close Reading (C. O. P. V, 1950) is going to be screened as part of I AM NOT A POET: A FESTIVAL AT THE TOTALKUNST GALLERY, EDINBURGH (7-21st AUGUST 2011). It is also being screened online here.

VerySmallKitchen and theTotalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh, present I AM NOT A POET, a 2 week festival exploring connections of language, writing and art practice. Beginning with conversations and lectures as part of AN EDINBURGH ZINE & SMALL PRESS FAIR on 7th August, I AM NOT A POET presents a series of short one - three day exhibitions, alongside conversations, lectures, performances, publications, and screenings … Artists include: Pete Cant, Magdalen Chua, Patrick Coyle, Alex Eisenberg, Jennie Guy, Colin Herd, Shandra Lamaute, Michelle Letowska, Marit Muenzberg, nick e-melville, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Gerry Smith, seekers of lice. Curated by David Berridge (VerySmallKitchen) and Mirja Koponen (Totalkunst Gallery)

Close Reading (C.O.P.V, 1950)

Close Reading (C.O.P.V, 1950) is part of an ongoing series which investigates the practice of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’. Here, close reading is not understood as the critical attention paid to the meaning of words themselves as signs, but is instead interested in those meanings produced by looking at words ‘close up’, through a process of visual magnification or close visual attention. The work will also be screened online, but in the meantime can be viewed below.

Details: Emma Cocker, Close Reading (C.O.P.V, 1950)

Details: Emma Cocker, Close Reading (C.O.P.V, 1950)

Project: L’ultima Cena

I have been invited to visit and respond to an exhibition/project entitled L’ultima cena, taking place at the Refettorio di San Michele in Pescia, Italy (3-4 September). L’ultima cena is a project initiated by an invitation issued to 13 artists (including Brigid McLeer with whom I have worked before) to make sited work in response to the little known and rarely seen ‘Last Supper’ fresco by Fieravante Sansoni (1625) located in the former convent refectory, the Refettorio di San Michele in Pescia. It is anticipated that this context will provide a foil against which to explore slippages of representation, time and reality occurring both within the fresco, through its relationship to an ‘original’, and also to the site itself. Starting points for exploration are likely to include ideas around 'being with' and empathy; relations between individual and collective identity; the affective potentiality of everyday situations; a collapsing of the binary relation of fidelity and betrayal. More to follow soon.

Project: Summer Lodge

Over the last few weeks I have been involved in the Summer Lodge at Nottingham Trent University. For ten days in July the Fine Art studios and workshops of Nottingham Trent University played host to a gathering of thirty diverse artists. This group comprising of current staff, student interns, and artists working in the city of Nottingham and beyond, initiated new dialogues and critical exchange through engaging together in a period of sustained studio/workshop practice. The Summer Lodge was intended as an opportunity to think through making by being able to work for a while without many of the usual constraints and distractions. As part of the Summer Lodge I have been thinking more about the potential of residency-based approaches to making work which I hope to explore further over the coming years. 

The Summer Lodge also involved a one-day symposium entitled, The Speculation. Outline: "In the current economic and political climate, the old cliché rings true: the only certainty is that there is no certainty. In such times, existing models and familiar territories can no longer be relied upon, a situation that is especially pressing within the fields of art practice and research, given government prioritization of STEM subjects within universities and the decrease in arts funding outside academia. Whilst it is all to easy to become despondent in such gloomy times, by contrast the Visual Arts research area will seek to speculate upon new directions and alternative possibilities, exploring a troubling grey area, a critical terrain vague which might disturb the smooth landscape of what is already named and known. This work develops out of an already extant research cluster in Visual Arts, which has hitherto focused upon ideas of irresolution, doubt, deferral, uncertainty to explore the potential of remaining ‘Still Unresolved’, but is intended to help us shape the future direction/s of Visual Arts research, and to further develop conversations, collaborations and other projects with colleagues across the School of Art and Design and beyond, as these ideas intersect with other disciplines."

Presenters: Will Bowden (Associate Professor of Roman Archaeology, Nottingham University), Emma Cocker (Artist, Writer and Senior Lecturer NTU), Dr. Nick Flynn (Programme Leader Applied Criminology, Community and Criminal Justice Division De Montfort University) Alice Gale-Feeny (Intern and 3rd Yr Fine Art student NTU), Rebecca Gamble (Artist and Research Student NTU) Dr. Jonathan Gilhooly (Brighton Based Artist and educator) Prof. Julian Henderson (Professor of Archaeological Science, University of Nottingham), Sally O’Reilly (Writer), John Plowman (Artist, Curator and Co-director Beacon Art Project), Tim Rundle (Design Trend Forecaster, Principal Lecturer, Programme Leader Fashion Marketing Management & Communication), Niki Russell (Nottingham based Artist/Producer and member of REACTOR), Nicola Streeten (Illustrator, co-director of Laydeez do Comics and co-director of Beacon Art Project)