Dear F,

This did begin as a thank you email for great book recommendations . . . my index of lostness and unfathoming continues to take me on some gorgoeus wordy travels.

Once again Solnit has taken me towards more treasures which with a little digging include, it might be A Field Guide to Getting Lost but there are treasure maps a plenty available, I guess all good treasure yarns include a few juicy ‘lost’ chapters. She quotes Zizek countering Rumsfield wonderfully about the unknown knowns, which she and he ring within that fabulous notion of ‘the unconscious’. When I was in Australia listening to the altruistic motivations of fellow technoscientific artists in resident at SymbioticA, all I think from ‘new worlds’ (and feeling hugely admiring of their intents) I became acutely ware of my relationship to this unknown and perhaps fictional terrain of the unconscious. I didn’t necessarily buy it as any kind of reality but so far from Europe I became aware of felt a deep affinity with it and it’s shaping of some kind of me - associated with the Western European geographic/cultural location. The unconscious - as Jung said on some telly program I caught a moment of in Ireland, is precisely that, unconscious. My own bioartistic motivations felt (before even words could describe them) neurotic, dark, something from the cellar, dremt, unformed (formless?), and undefined - or differentiated from incorporated gut entrenched unknowing known.

So I dug up the entire Zizek article that has this fabulous opening line:

“If you want to understand why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, not the National Security Strategy of the United States.”
Zizek, Iraq’s False Promises

So I’m heading back to Lacan some day and why not. There’s fun to be had with them fellows. Navigations between language and syncope, under and over, making room for strangeness.

But also Solnit must be about the same age as us, there’s post punk, post industrial aesthetic that’s given to intricate literary grace but also a kind of recognised sensibility of body - text relationship that I wonder about and whether it is generational. I don’t know. I’m curious.

Love to you,

Kira

The SPILL Salons are informal events that are intended to allow people to engage with some of the strands of practice and thematics presented during the festival.

Salon 2
Monday 13th April
3 – 5 pm,
The Edge, Soho Square.

Feasts
Food and eating as cultural, political, economic and social practices; celebratory, sensory, perceptual, feasts and feasting will be explored as an entry point to digest SPILL’s multitude of courses. Archaeologist Martin Jones will discuss how humans first came to share food and the ways in which the human meal has developed since that time and how our culture of feasting has had far-reaching consequences for human social evolution. Australia artist Boo Chapple will talk about her art project Hand to Mouth and it examination of means of production, economies and waste, UK based artist John O’Shea will introduce Meat Licence, an artistic intervention into meat consumption, legislation and ethics of meat production.