I am enjoying the conference – I have particularly enjoyed sessions where delegates have been encouraged to participate – I made notes during the sessions I attended. I am going to type these up and include them along with my stuff
First session
From Lacan to Barad : the body and material entanglements with Margaret Somerville and Sue Collins
Sue : Embodied theory, messy, destabilised expert knower – blah writing , stream of consciousness. 30 yr old story , a cat knocks at a door asking to be let in. It starts with a cat. The cat is sitting on my chest . Needed to make connections, to make a meaningful story. Free associations Mothers, the act of writing, a cat. A form of subjectivity, language, and representation.
Margaret : “Body landscape journals” people embodied in the landscape indigenous people – she wanted to belong in the landscape. aural tradition – abstract thought made her feel ill. French feminist theory.
Places, where the people sat, table, water tank, maternal relationships
“Tissue Talk” massage, exploring image, Freud hysterical women, wrote images, bodily presence, how productive failure is. Mirror Stage Lacan. emergence of language from the body. an Aunt died the matriarchal responses I a policeman Young Man your handwriting is terrible – what your hand is writing is terrible. Time , how long does an Agential cut last? , radical shift, 30 yrs space, time, mother. New Materialist – child in a sand pit – sand forming child, child forming sand. Epistemic shift. Water as data,child playing at the edge of a river, the silence, the gurgling of the water,drizzling sand, a stone in a pocket, the ontology of lemons, plums, different modes, footfall.
We were asked to free association write here is what I came up with
‘Plums, lemons, feet, furry textures , mouths , peaches, jumpers, a water tank , a wooden porch, the movement created by the throwing out of a cat, fear, terror.
The terrible things that the hand wrote. Hands, feet, appendages, touch, massage, leaning in against a mountain, pain, my shoulders, your knee, my neck
My brother doesn’t like apricots because they taste like furry peaches….there is a surrealist sculpture of a furry cup and saucer …(by Meret Oppenhiem) – that I disliked intensely as a teenager- the thought of that fur , wet in my mouth drinking a cup of tea.
I am channelling my mothers handwriting and it is freaking me out, like the knock at the door in the middle of the night . My thoughts are going round and round randomly ‘
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