we are ghostwriters

2020, at Superfluous Arts

Performance (1 hour)

‘We are ghostwriters’ is a collaborative and performative reading and writing ritual focused on a consideration of what it means to be dead, developed by three artist friends: two living, one dead. For our autumn residency at Superfluous Arts, Laura Ni Fhlaibhin and I started from a shared loss; the death of our friend Adam, of Covid19. We looked back at a sculpture that the three of us carried and we saw an urn, made of dissolvable material. We developed a weekly writing ritual onto the soapy egg surface, a kind of life affirming action, rooted in alliances between disparate worlds. 

We set up a reading group discussion around two novels; ‘The Posthumous Memoir of Bras Cubas’ and ‘The Third Policeman’, both narrated from the perspective of a dead person and we allowed these group discussions to play a role in the development of the performance piece.

We played in the slippages of language and syntax and cognition, during the writing process. We misheard and misinterpreted our utterances and half-baked trails of thought, slippery things. And then we generated a synthetic echo, getting slippier still and we revelled in the absurdity but also the particular relevance of hearing us back through a synthetic American female accent, courtesy of google chrome text to speech voice reader app .

The soap egg became less egg and more urn, perhaps the result of weekly balming and lathering and travelling the parameters of the studios in a funeral cortege of sorts. After our last cortege procession, it seems fitting that the egg urn unfolded in photo-geometric dots and pinpoints, plotting its’ celestial coordinates.

Photogammetric scans of the sculpture after performances by Ariel Caine (Forensic Architecture)