This morning I am listening to a 2008 recording of Anne Carson’s Sonnet Sequence as I drink coffee in my quarters at Saari Residency in the south west countryside of Finland. The performance of layerings, vocalities, de and reconstructions are dazzling and leave me wondering of how I might go about constructing the multivocal pieces I heard in my minds ear earlier this year whilst living for some weeks within the wild sonic cacophonies in Kathmandu. Might these works find their way into form somehow within the silence of Saari.
I arrived here from Helsinki on Thursday, a heavy fall of snow transformed the countryside as we drove from the city, by the time we reached Mynämäki the whiteness of the powdery solidity of the water elements crystals surrounded us. The estate and it’s environs seemed to stretch out their arms as we drove up to the main house, and it’s quietness welcomed us. The thick powder of snow softens and absorbs sound, it also lights the nighttime with it’s complexity flake structures.
Tiredness had permeated my copious packing for what will be approximately a two month stay here at Koneen Säätio through the darkness to the end of the calendar year. Books, food, warm clothes, a small amount of too hastily packed materials (so much I need to source still - or forget about). My great friend and Vajra sister helped load her car and dive me the three hours to approximately 40 km north of Turku.
Arriving at Saari, wearing Ron Athey’s Acephalous Monster t-shirt
My tiredness was the effect of long travel, and late nights whilst enjoying the intensity of attending an outstanding conference to which I had been invited to give one of four keynotes, the first international Queer Death Studies Conference at Karlstad University in Sweden. The two day conference was organised by the Queer Death Studies Network which was launched two years ago at launched in November 2016 at the Swedish National Gender Research Conference in Linköping.
The keynote I gave was a reiteration of one given at year ago at Quite Frankly, it’s a Monster conference, a performative reading of an assemblage of texts convened and written as an act of contemplation on the life and death of a great friend. The reading only occurs live, for those in attendance., listening is the primary mode of reception. There are no recordings or copies of the text available. The affective potential of the text found it’s home within the registers that the organisers established during their preliminary introductions. Together Marietta Radmonska, Tara Mehrabi and Nina Lykke opened up the territories of Queer Death Studies, which included Nina’s introduction of her own work - Vibrant Death (publication forthcoming) which acknowledges and explicitly performs grief performed through posthuman aesthetics and poetics. The keynotes given by Patricia MacCormack, Stine W. Adrian and C. Riley Snorton, and parallel panel streams provided further currents through the thematics of ‘Death Matters, Queer(ing) Mourning, Attuning to Transitionings’ moved. Each keynote has typically opened up further areas of thinking and enquiry for me, and more reading of all three I hope as well as reading and thinking about presentatins and conversations with people such as Kathy High, Margrit Sheldrick, Yvonne Billman, Eliza Steinbock to name only a few of the many.
I had not anticipated the transformative possibilities of this conference, how deeply it’s care and conduct of response-aibility effected a life changing experience. Despite the fullness of the programme, adequate time had been given for questions and comments following both keynotes and panels, conversation was further affored during breaks and mealtimes. It’s quite a trip to Karlstad, some four hours north of Stockholm and I think each of us felt it entirely worth while.
Yesterday Iris, one of the people who works here at Saari came to welcome me and generously delivered a package containing the t-shirt from Ron Athey’s extraordinary current work, Acephalous Monster. ( there is an interview with Ron about the work here ) A welcome and auspicious start to this period of both solitude and community here. I am looking forward to the unexpected turns of my work which will inevitably occur, the surprises that greet one along the ways of making. But also of learning about the other artists here, their practices and what influences from them might sway and inform my processes.