What Place Remains?

Thoughts, questions, reflections

after TaPRA PG Symposium 2017 at University of Leeds

‘Silence stalks me’, she says.

How much alignment does a politician need between campaign promises

and what is actually delivered to leave a heroic legacy?

The performance of authenticity is not reliability.

Charisma is not indicative of wisdom

or the selfless ability to serve.

What qualifies as an excess of performance in politics?

What performances do we expect of politicians?

Let us unfetter language as we tune down the affect of sound

Silence apportions space.

Someone once said, ‘Silence is possible in an anechoic chamber,

but not with John Cage in it’.

The noise of our bodies, together, in space.

‘Does silence break word or do these words break silence?

You can choose silence but it never chooses you’

Can we dialogue through silence when words,

once articulated,

destroy all other potential words held in silence?

What is the ghost that lingers

in iconic theatres?

Can the national ever be separated from the historical?

Is the unfinished business Shakespeare’s,

Polykleitos the Younger who built the ancient theatre of Epidaurus,

or the people’s?

A longing for some place they lost…

…

‘One day, in the future, the chicken will become the most studied fossil’

for anthropologists.

How can we create art politically when

politics threatens to turn art into propaganda?

What invocations do we make with the pilgrimage to monumental places?

How does the anywhereness of convergent media

exacerbate our addiction to extract only that which is relevant to our lives?

To reduce what we experience to make meaning of it?

Can we stop wanting to win?

How does responsive design attend to meritocracy’s losers?

Must we be cruel to be invulnerable?

In other words,

can we play without being vulnerable?

‘The blog became a rear-view mirror’,

she reads for the author who is absent,

‘a space where the road behind me constantly foregrounded the road ahead

and the past was always present in the future’ (Pinchbeck 2016).

Can it be a meeting place where only one writes?

Is there place for conversations in a blog?

The journey we make is part of the ghosting

of place and places to be.

If you wait for something to be there for you,

it won’t be.

You have to make it up.

This is not a haiku

…these are just fragments of notes,

taken during Intersections 2017.

Adaptation as a Franken practice

Practice that seems closer than references

Revealing to trouble assumptions

Haptic ways of knowing. Thinking with your skin.

Touching is believing

To keep experimenting against the silence

To attend to affective alterities

The Imagination is also a place of struggle

Edward Soja (1940 – 2 Nov 2015): On ‘Thirdspace’

One of the ideas that I greatly value from Edward Soja is the concept of Thirdspace.

Soja uses ‘Thirdspace’ to describe ‘a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings’ that provides new alternatives, opportunities and possibilities for openness and diversity (Soja 1996: 2, 99). Building on Lefebvre’s ‘lived space or social space’, Soja’s Thirdspace, is arguably more future-oriented and offers broader scope for intervention. Lefebvre’s ‘social space’ describes how social hierarchies are prescribed according to one’s age and gender, maintained through relationships of employment and transaction within the ‘space of society’ (Lefebvre [1974] 1991: 35). Soja’s Thirdspace acknowledges how the lived experience of a particular location can vary according to one’s gender, race and social status, but reaches beyond one’s lived experience to include one’s aspiration for this particular location, and one’s lived experience within it (11). This conception of Thirdspace goes further than Lefebvre’s ‘social space’ or ‘lived space’ which focussed primarily on the shifting simultaneity of present meanings created through one’s social interactions with others within a site. In the context of Singapore, Thirdspace could be conceived as all futures possible and the multiplicity of places possible within it.