Critical Encounters

The Critical Encounters week with Astarti brought me the practice of (what I now call) thinking-writing-in-space. The week focussed on writing and embodiment, approaching text from the senses. How does it sound? What does it look like? What does it make you feel in your body? This brought me to a mode of writing where the poetic and the reflective started to collide. I question whether this landed me in a diffractive mode.

We started the week writing in different spaces, and seeing how that affected our dealing with language. Quickly I found that I struggled to write in a studio, or at a desk. My preferred writing spaces where in a corner on the floor in the corridor, outside on the grass, next to the Rijn, and at home in my kitchen. Also the times I wrote where almost always outside of the assigned/scheduled times. Language seemed to flow much easier at other moments, like when cooking dinner, or while taking a walk, or in between two other tasks. These moments I felt my brain could work more freely, connections that previously felt hard to explain suddenly found words.
This lead me to literally ‘go with the flow’ of the writing, letting my thoughts slip out onto the paper (or screen) and try to truly think through the writing. 

 

 

Halfway through the week I decided to leave and go visit the GoDrag22 festival in Berlin. An opportunity for me to dive into the world of drag kings and quings, to question the place of gender bending in my research. And I took the practice of thinking-writing(-in-space) with me, writing every day, both on the task for CE and for my personal reflection. I found myself writing in all moments that can loosely be labeled as ‘in-between’. Starting on the metro, in-between shows, in-between exploring the city and heading into the festival, while waiting for my food, while having a coffee before heading into a discussion panel. Places that could be labeled as non-places according to Marc Augé’s (2008) theory. Places of transience, of low significance because you will not stay there for very long and you did not come there for the place, but to pass through it. Also places that might give a new perspective on the mundane, for sometimes distance changes the image. It gave me a space of reflection in calmness. 
Being outside of ‘normal life’ for a brief period of time, the entire trip became a bit of an in-between. A place outside of regular, or organized, time and space. A place and time outside of the studio while still related to work/research. A space and time of moving towards and through experiences. And a space and time that I knew I would move out of again in the near future, therefor constantly remaining in the liminal, in some ways; a non-space. For me a great place of writing. So the practice became one of thinking through writing in non-space. 

 

And I found myself writing about a lot of in-betweens, considering again the place of the nonbinary, in my work and personal life. I felt myself circling around something, that I could not quite grasp. Something that remains unnamable still. 

 

On the second day I wrote:

I keep returning to the colour yellow

Maybe it’s all the yellow metro’s going around

Maybe it’s the start of a new character

The colour furthest removed from both blue and pink

Impossible to be classified as either for then it would equally be both (and neither)

There is something youthful in the colour

Reminding me of the wellies I had on the family holidays in France

Careful now, don’t infantilize me/myself

I’m not referring to youthfulness in regards to hairlessness or curvelessness or smoothness or any appearance-related-ness

I’m flirting with the concept of being playful, of seeing and embodying opportunity and change, of relishing in the becoming

Becoming different, becoming more

Diane Torr is very present in her absence

Her spirit everywhere, her name in every event

Yellow is the colour of spring, of the sun and new opportunities

Of choosing new paths

Maybe that’s why Berlin public transport is yellow

For you to choose your own direction. 

 

An example of how my thoughts just flowed around and I followed them, to come back to them later and rearrange them or make any kind of sense of them. 

 

This text I revisited many times since I returned from Berlin. Analyzing what thoughts I actually put on the paper here. Not quite rewriting, but re-considering and thinking further on these lines, trying to find the centre that I did not name. 

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In this text I combined my thoughts on colour, on gender, of personal history, of futurity, of transience, on my practice. I interpret this through the lens of Uncreative writing, the approach offered to us by Astarti. I don’t use the method of Uncreative writing (Goldsmith, 2011) exactly as was offered to us, but I take with me some of it’s principles. Mainly the idea of not creating new texts every time, but working with what is already there. I adapt the method not to write new texts but to understand the previous ones in new ways. (This is my way of de-disciplining; taking the skills from a certain method/field/idea and applying it somewhere else) 

 

One of the moments I revisited this text was during the GrasED module on colour and light. Picking up a previously expressed idea on the colors pink, blue and yellow and putting it next to this text and the new material daz offered us. I started to question the meaning I assign to the colour yellow in this text and how it’s culturally re-enforced. I also questioned the culturally assigned significance to pink and blue. A western concept that has accumulated so much power that people struggle to unsee the meaning when they see the colour. And I added the idea that the colour pink actually does not exist, but is the combining of two very different wavelengths that our eyes combine into this experience of pink. And then I got to the idea of the impossible colors, colors that we cannot create or perceive and maybe not even imagine, but that does not mean they don’t exist. 

 

And this brought me back to the text, the unnamable and the nonbinary identity. Colours that we cannot imagine or perceive but do exist, like a yellow-ish blue that’s not a green, or a green-ish red that is not a brown, are quite similar to my experience of gender. Gender, and especially the non-binary genders, as something non-essentialist, fluid, and unnamable. For we cannot grasp them, we cannot perceive them necessarily through the lenses we have and are taught by society, but they are still there. In the gaps, in the in-betweens or out-betweens.

 

And I enjoy the new considerations that sprung from this little poetic, journal-style text.  

 

My next step was to scroll through my personal archive of performances, and see what colors I am drawn to there and what meaning I make of that now. I run into many hues of blues, turquoises, purples, pinks, and lately much more muted tones of brown, beige. The colors we classify sometimes as ‘natural’. 

 

Two images appear side by side. A portrait of my Pink King, a character fully dressed in hot pink complete with a synthetic pink wig and beard, and next to it a portrait of one of my latest performances Becoming my nonbinary body (2), my body and face covered in beige clay with soft warm light. In both images I see on my face a soft sadness, but their effect is drastically different. The pink (and the fact that it is synthetic material) makes it seem like a mask, fake, plastic, not real. Where the beige (and the fact that it’s a natural material) makes it seem real, soft, warm, intimate and human. 

 

And still, both images circle around the same unnamable centre. They portray something of a very intimate identity, which has to do with gender, both the experienced gender and the performed and the misalignment between them.  It has to do with becoming, a term that keeps popping up in my writings without knowing what. In much of my work I return to silence, for even attempting to name this unnamable centre damages it slightly. So in different ways I keep circling around it and I try not to grab it or hold on to it too much. I write my texts, and put them together with each other and in the space between, in the re-re-re-considerations, the unnamable emerges. I create my performances, share these moments with the audience, create the intimacy needed to communicate differently, and then the unnamable can be felt in the space. And I create my images, re-re-re-calling the moment and re-re-re-configuring them in time and (non-)space with other images and texts, and the circle tightens, the spiral moves into the center without ever touching it, and the unnamable remains unnamed. 

 

 

 

REFERENCES:

Augé, M. (2008). Non-Places : Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. 2nd English language ed. London: Verso.

Goldsmith K. (2011). Uncreative Writing : Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

McGlotten S. (2022). Dragging : Or in the Drag of a Queer Life. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.