Holly pester4/3/2023 Therefore a lullaby might be a chorus for all bodies, affectively performing a different worksong, a kind of common rest.’ ‘While a lullaby sounds out the material labour of care, makes its flesh and breath felt, it also sounds out the radical obscuring of work. Each track has its own unique aesthetic, exploring different female responses to ideas of work and play, care and collaboration, motherhood and sexuality, curses and spells.Ĭreated through a series of 3-hour recording sessions in which each track was devised from scratch, the sound pieces and songs collected on the album explore the complex sounds and dynamics of the lullaby, variously manifested as whispered chants, fast-paced dialogues, layered, contrapuntal vocal lines, spoken and sung, jazz riffs and ASMR soundscapes, and playful, childlike songs. The album comprises 7 tracks, each a collaboration between Pester and another artist, in which ideas associated with lullabies form the basis for an improvisation. The project is the creative output of work developed by Pester during her residency with Hubbub – an international team of scientists, historians, artists and broadcasters based at the Wellcome Collection – materialising Pester’s interest in speech rhythms and patterns which are responsive to work and rest. As she puts it, ‘The struggle was a life nerve… The journey was on.With Emma Bennett, Vahni Capildeo, Jenny Moore, Nat Raha, Vera Rodriguez, Verity Spott and Claire TolanĬommon Rest is a multimedia collaborative work consisting of a 10-inch vinyl album with an accompanying book of poems by Holly Pester. It’s interesting to put these texts against a startling scene of rupture and revolution in action from Angela Davies’s autobiography where she explains to Theodor Adorno that she must leave Frankfurt and cease studying with him in order to join the Black Panther and SNCC (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) movements in Los Angeles. In comparison Shelley argues that the poet’s creative imagination, his or her ‘faculty of approximation’, is the perception of relations that are resistant to social order and grammar, with the potential, therefore, for society. Stein’s radical language was a ‘remoulding the codes of life’ in the face of war. Gertrude Stein’s ‘Composition as Explanation’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’ pursue ideas on composition, creativity, and the work of the poet in relation to society. The study of experience via language in society and our potential tools for reorienting it is undertaken through a mix of theoretical criticism and personal testimony. The process of living through mutations of body and language, something we might call experience, is dissected throughout the book. Metaplasm, meaning words swerved by mutation into new meaning, is conceptualised by Haraway as ‘remoulding the codes of life’ in order to make a ‘fleshy difference’.12 Haraway’s understanding of ‘metaplasms’, featuring later in the book, is also a good connection here. The mechanisms of revolution are created by bodies desire is the unpredictable force that orientates them. This suggestion that the mechanisms of revolution are embodied is a key point, through which we get countless openings into many of the fellow texts, such as Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘Naturecultures’ (where body and technology, sign and object, machine and media, etcetera, are dissolved of their binarisms) and of course the Lucretian swerve. Desire is the swerve that originates the possible.’11 Shulamith Firestone’s observation of storytelling as a lost community art is compared to revolution as a potential community art to be reclaimed, or ‘a story that takes an entire winter to tell’ with ‘no conclusion, no moral, no hero.’9 Revolution and metaphor are compellingly matched through Percy Bysshe Shelley on account of both actions bringing into play ‘a previously unperceived relation of things.’10 Eileen Myles’ astonishing line in ‘The Lesbian Poet’, ‘we all write poems with our metabolisms, our sexuality’ is responded to by Robertson with, ‘The poesis of revolution is specific to our cellular movements. ![]() There are many annotated moments when Robertson equates a description of literary culture or technique with revolution’s gestural processes. ![]() ![]() It’s an invitation to share the potential in being a reader." More: At Three Letter Words, Pester writes that "here the term ‘revolution: a reader’ isn’t just a description of the anthology, but of the people who will participate in the investigation into revolution, i.e. Poet and sound artist Holly Pester looked at the compendium Revolution: A Reader, compiled and annotated by Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler for Publication Studio in 2012. This was one of our favorite finds this weekend.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |