Andrew Lock: Performing Research, Writing Silence
I will take my recently completed spoken-word performance work, ‘Between Our Words I Will Trace Your Presence’ – from which I will perform an excerpt – as the starting point for discussing the place of writing in my work. Specifically, I will explore my artistic research’s capacity to examine different sites of silence; familial, textual and institutional. My work deals with silence not as a sensate phenomenon, but as something relational; something enacted or performed, founded in acts of repression and denial; its character always specific to a given set of circumstances, but always characterised by the presence of something unspoken or unheard.
In my examination of such silences, I have found myself adopting strategies which draw on Jane Rendell’s model of ‘site writing’. Also developing a mode of autofiction writing, which is informed by Mona Livholts’ conception of a ‘situated writing’ practice and which lays emphasis on insights localised in the writing-subject’s position. Together, these approaches create a writing subject, whose presence and experience are central to the creation of both site and knowledge.
My writing also aspires to a performative – as opposed to an expositional – agency and through spoken word performances, I have been performing my writing. In this presentation, I will discuss my writing practice and introduce the issues raised by the proposition that my writing and my performance of my research have the potential to create distinctive relationships between researcher, knowledge and audience.
Bio
An artist, researcher and educator, Andy Lock is currently an assistant professor at the University of Bergen’s faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, where between 2016 and 2020, he was a Research Fellow. He has exhibited internationally and his current artistic research has appeared through commissions, presentations, exhibitions and other events, in Germany, Sweden, Cyprus and Norway since 2016; most recently published as part of ‘Fluid Territories’, 2020, Sandborg et al.