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Mrs Dalloway is one of my favourite books and was the first modernist novel I read. I was completely in awe with Woolf’s use of free indirect discourse, and how the book was set on one day but the past, present and future were able to coexist so perfectly. I like how time is represented as non-linear, as we live several years in one day, I think her exploration of personal memories and how small objects can invoke those memories is what stood out to me. So much is revealed of the characters In Mrs Dalloway in such a small book, the language is rich and visceral; as a reader one is transported to those memories. I’ve read this book several times now and it is one that I have highlighted most, and every time I read it, I notice another small detail that seems to highlight the interconnectedness of consciousness.

‘And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread . . . which would stretch and stretch. . . as if one's friends were attached to one's body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which . . . is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down."

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The first half of Orlando pastiches the traditional historian/biographer as mischievously and hilariously as Nabokov’s brilliant Pale Fire pastiches establishment’s literary critic. It’s the work of a writer inspired, on a roll and thank heavens we have this evidence of Woolf’s comic genius. Anyone who thinks of Woolf as a rather pretentious humourless prig clearly hasn’t read Orlando. Of all her books it’s the one which most gives you an idea of what she was like at a dinner table. Thus, ironically, the most biographical in terms of giving us some essence of the social Virginia – offhand, witty, versatile, self-deprecating, a show off, intellectual, silly, indignant, giggling. Orlando is like a guided tour through VW’s likes and dislikes. We learn what pleases her and what angers her - and of course she writes beautifully of her love of England, its countryside, its history and its capital. There’s also a sense that she’s sometimes showing off with certain friends in mind – you realise while reading this book that there’s a subtle but hugely significant difference between genius in full stride and showing off: even though genius in full stride can seem like showing off it never quite does. You don’t see the performance. Here you sometimes can see the performance. You can see the anatomy of the dance steps rather than one continuous fluid motion. So who was she showing off to? I don’t think it was Vita at all. It might have started as a bit of fun with Vita in mind but to my mind it’s Lytton Strachey she’s often thinking about while writing this. He was the writer who sought to revolutionise biography as a form and probably the male intellect among her brother’s formally educated friends she was most intimidated by. It’s like she’s now found the confidence to feel herself his equal, which she didn’t feel as a young woman. While he was receiving his Cambridge education she was compelled to read many of the countless biographies in her father’s library. No wonder she hates conventional biography so much. Orlando was her revenge on all those dull male minds who believed identity was constructed from dates, battles, rank and official documents. The same kind of men who believed women were better seen and not heard. What does all this have to do with Vita? For me far too much has been made of her relationship with Vita. Nearly all my female friends have had lesbian crushes at some point in their lives. It’s something we laugh about; not something that history should use to define who we are. The idea that had Woolf lived in more tolerant times she would have lived happily in a lesbian relationship to my mind is just daft, as daft in its way as the convictions held by the historians and biographers she mocks in this book.

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I think Aftersun was an incredibly moving watch and did a lot visually to represent a childhood reflection on a memory. As a viewer we feel that the experience that the main protagonist is reflecting on is tinged with a level of sadness, that the child version of herself was not aware of at the time. Interwoven into the shots taken on a camera are home videos of late 90’s early 2000’s VHS shots which are blurry at times- representing gaps in memory. It is a very clever way of creating parallel between the fact that as a viewer we are watching a memory. I found the dialogue also powerful in highlighting the bittersweet nature of revisiting this time and does a good job of representing the mind of an 11-year-old, who is on the brink of puberty, where there is a growing awareness of sexuality, familial issues, and politics. I particularly liked this shot of a polaroid image slowly developing as the conversation plays over the image slowly develops- I think it’s an idea I would like to experiment with myself.

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My written work on unreliable narrators 

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My written work on unreliable narrators 

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“In the humdrum routine of personal existence, History did not matter. We were simply happy or unhappy, depending on the day. The more immersed we were in work and family, said to be reality, the greater was our sense of unreality.” - The Years by Annie Ernaux

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“They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.”- The Years by Annie Ernaux

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The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

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The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

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I enjoy the whimsical nature of leonora carrington's story telling and I have found this inspiring in my own writing practice, as Carrington often uses animals and mythological creatures as characters in her work.

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Recently I have been writing short stories, exploring the life of an old woman who has an encounter with an angel, and the surreal qualities to story telling

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Family photographs, in particular historical ones seem to be a visual indicator of genealogy and family history. I think it is interesting, that for my mum’s side of the family there seems to be a real lack of photographs, and those that did exist were lost after my grandparent’s death. Through conversations with my mum the desire not to hold onto photographs stems from some of her sibling’s desire to let go of childhood. This was down to the somewhat tricky relationship with their parents. Haven spoken to her, I think now that many years have passed since their death, she regrets not taking more agency over the situation of preserving my grandparent’s belongings and wishes she had kept images of them.

Images during my grandparent’s lifetime and my parents’ childhood were physical handheld objects, that were temporal; they taken with film; if the film was not developed properly the images would be lost, they would fade with time, they could be ripped, burned or hidden, this is something we don’t have now.  Photographs are forever stored in technological memory and even when images are deleted; there never quite gone, as they float around in the ether of ‘The Cloud’.

I think also family photos are an inaccurate representation of family life; especially historical ones as taking images was not as accessible as it was today, as cameras were expensive, and so families would go to photo studios for images to be taken. If cameras were owned, you were reduced to taking 36 images at a time, which meant people thought more consciously about the images that they took.

When I interpret the lives of my grandfathers, they appear very differently.

My grandfather on my mum’s side grew up in rural tribal Zimbabwe under colonial rule, and from what is known had no access to cameras, at least on a first-hand family basis. This means that the story of my Sekuru (Shona for grandpa) is relied upon entirely by word of mouth; the stories told to me by my aunts, uncles and mum, and even then, there very little is known of his biography. By stark contrast, my Opa (Dutch for grandpa) on my dad’s side of the family came from a middle-class family of chemists and had access to a family camera, this meant that there are relatively many images of my Opa as a child. I think that the access to not only a camera but space and time as a middle-class family meant that many of the documents that tell my grandpa’s life story have been preserved, and means I have a rich understanding of his life story.

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Elizabeth Price’s work has made me think a lot about the story of our lives through technological capacities, with apps such as BeReal, making users capture two images at a random time in the day every day, a biography of a person’s life is slowly built over time.

BeReal set out to do one thing, in a world of totally curated images of our lives it offered a space to be genuine and an ‘accurate’ representation of daily life. Accept the app couldn’t be more inauthentic. Despite the marketing, it appeared that the “two minute” time frame to take a picture could actually be anytime within 24 hours. Instead of taking pleasure seeing other people being lazy on a Saturday morning, users saw them wait to post nine hours later from more interesting settings like a bar, or 30 minutes later, when they were out of their Disney pyjamas.

I think that the incessant desire for people to post late at a time when they know they are doing something that socially might be deemed as ‘interesting’ or prove ‘coolness’, ‘popularity’ etc, just proves how the stories we tell of our lives seem particularly unreliable.

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I have never been able to watch or experience this artwork fully, however I have listened to several interviews with Price and I enjoyed her discussion of her work Felt tip. In particular, her use of collected objects over time, specifically ties. Ties are not only symbols of status, masculinty but also memory.  The earlier ties she collected were embellished with emblems signifying elite colleges the wearers belonged to or clubs attended, and alluded to social memory, as time passed and as Price began collecting ties from the 70’s and 80’s where the imagery these ties bore seemed to allude to technological memory or the capacity for memory.

I think the idea of natural memory vs technological memory is more relevant than ever now as the vast majority of the western world has access to smart phones that can take photos and hold them in their memory. Technology has unlocked a capacity for memory that the human brain is unable to hold onto with such a visceral quality, with access to a camera role at your fingertips you can simply scroll back years and return to videos, or photographs that unlock sedated memories.

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The Autonomous Odyssey
2018

The work is developed as a set of five monologues that speak towards questions of contemporary struggle, and the bonds that may arise through the sharing of particular social imaginaries. Staged by a group of performers associated with the special environment of Sala 603, an unofficial theater space located in a house in Curitiba, Brazil, the work is presented through two parallel video projections. As viewers we follow each performer as they reflect upon journeys made and journeys still to come, leading us deeper into a poetic maze of hope and despair, and possibilities for transformation. They speak of the squatting of abandoned buildings, the creative and critical endeavors found in making life together, the joy of shared resistances and the exhaustion. Recorded throughout the rooms of Sala 603, the work creates an uncanny relation to the city, and the ongoing demonstrations that were taking place during the making of the work outside the jail where former President Lula was being held. Echoes and frictions come to pass between the interiority of the house and the city outside, capturing the ways in which domestic environments can assist in alternative forms of public action and the making of family.

A work by Octavio Camargo / Brandon LaBelle.

Performers: Chiris Gomes, Raquel Rizzo, Eliane Campelli, Pagu Leal, Fernando Marés, Andressa Medeiros, Richard Rebelo, Denis Mariano (drums)
Videography: Gilson Camargo
Audio: Felipe Augusto
Additional photography: Rodrigo Augusto Ribeiro
Production assistance: Aline Sugi

Exhibited at Kunsthall 3,14, Bergen as part of The Imaginary Republic.

October 18 - December 16, 2018

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The work is developed as a set of five monologues that speak towards questions of contemporary struggle, and the bonds that may arise through the sharing of particular social imaginaries. Staged by a group of performers associated with the special environment of Sala 603, an unofficial theater space located in a house in Curitiba, Brazil, the work is presented through two parallel video projections.

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Helen Cammock, 'behind the eye is the promise of rain' at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany, 2022

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Helen Cammock 'behind the eye is the promise of rain' at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany, 2022 Installation view

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I really like how Kay explores memory through recounting public events such as the history of the world in Worldview or the events in the Bible in the Bible of memory. The works consists of columns that are interrupted by paragraph divisions, indents and spaces separating each other, these spaces signify omitted material, their size related to the artist’s perception of memory lapse. I think that this is a really clever way of visually representing gaps in memory, and this idea of loss of memory, particularly on a personal level is something I would like to research and explore in my FMP.

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I think Nan Goldin’s work was so shocking at the time as they brought to light very obvious yet taboo dynamics between men, women and the queer community to light through the material of photographs. Having watched her latest documentary, ‘All the Beauty and Bloodshed’ she discusses how she started by simply photographing her friends, in clubs and bars, and how she captured moments of sexual advances between them and how it then evolved into taking images of both her and others having sex. This revealing of the sexual intimacy associated with private spaces into a public one through the presentation of photographs, meant she was able to bring to light issues such as the problematic nature male dominance, the poor treatment of the queer community, the AIDS crisis and transphobia. I think that she brought a candid nature to the photographs that she took that were often less staged that her contemporaries, they were not pretty images but instead gritty, and sometimes gory and violent snapshots into her world.

“This is not a bleak world,” Goldin writes in her prescient preface to ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’, the photographic landmark that distilled the essence of ’80s downtown life, “But one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection.” Like all ballads, its vernacular is simple and concrete, its sequencing measured and meticulous. Louche lovers, friends and strangers sprawled in bathtubs, lying supine on sofas and across the backs of convertibles – people bonded not by blood, but by a similar morality, the need to live fully and for the moment – seen in candid light, captured in and out of bed in pre- and post-coital moments, posing, celebrating, immortalised with feral immediacy. The rich mélange of experience as depicted through her trademark slideshows has the power to resist, rupture and make noise, to move against the tide of “good taste”.

One of the most difficult elements is her complicated relationship with her parents, who deliver a bone-chilling, soul briefly leaving your body moment with a Heart of Darkness quote near the end, their dead daughter on the mind: “Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”

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Sherie Sitauze, mbedezi, our land, queens land, 2020

During the gallery trip to the New Contemporary’s gallery I was first introduced to Sitauze’s work, in her moving image piece mbedzi land, our land, queens land,( 2020), I really liked the way she had used a casual conversation with a family member about the ritual of calling for the rain in Zimbabwe and placed this audio over a collage of images and video of imagery of rural Zimbabwe. The contrast between the highly curated and thought through placement of visual media with the organic casualness of a conversation created an interested contrast and is an idea I would like to take forward in my FMP. I also found it exciting to discover a young artist of Zimbabwean heritage like me discussing Shona traditions.

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necessary conversations ~ sherie sitauze

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ii. Understanding barriers and Learning about how to pray for rain. 08:21.

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The simplistic nature of Tony Coke’s videos makes his work effective in allowing the text to speak for itself in the topics he discusses, such as politics, media and historical events. This is an idea I have taken in some of my own video work where I have begun to think about the amount of time, and words placed on the screen.

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Tony Cokes: 'There are certain things that only sound can or should do'

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The artist packs social critique into text-heavy slideshows on colorful screens. But the works' pop-music soundtracks are what drive his potent messages home and move us most

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'We don't have to accept the stories we inherit, the ones that tell us who we're supposed to be. We can stand up and say no at any point, even if we've been saying yes our entire lives. It is never too late. We can always reject the story placed on top of us, and we can always revise and destroy one story and restore another. It's a never ending possiblity'' - Lidia Yuknavitch

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I have never occupied a disconcerting position when it comes to language and family, in that I am lucky to call them people I have always felt comfortable with. In fact, I would go so far to say they are people who I feel most comfortable with. But this feeling of being like a stranger to both, and this feeling of foreigness is something I have discussed at large with both of my parents - of being ousiders therefore ill equipped to communicate a self through their parents and has settled like chips on their shoulders. It tends to colour most things they do and seeps into the way they have raised me, in that they have made every effort to ensure that they are not strangers to me. Though I am a generation removed, something similar troubles the narrator of Claudia Durastani's autobiograpical novel: her deaf parents are strangers she must claim to know as she traverses the multiple migrations innate to the story of her family- ''more like a map than a novel''- to grasp at the contours of the ''orignal and irreplacable landscape called I''.

The book is outstanding for its demonstration of the myths we create based around our parents and how they are perpetuated differently based on who is in charge.

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I have sat at this particular dinner table. Everyone's yelling. The shouts, the cross-examinations, the retorts hurl over the tablecloth, colliding into each other, the impact of the blast sending them careening off in new directions. Someone is listening to the story, but gets offended by it halfway through. Another is telling a story from the past, a family myth, that old legend. There are corrections, shaking heads.

Claudia Durastanti's latest novel came out January 25 from Riverhead Books and was translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris There is an early reference to an Emily Dickinson poem - ", Strangers I Know, takes that dinner scene kryptonite and injects it across the sprawling pages of a story set in Southern Italy, New York City, and London. The narrator unfurls a story that's part documentary, part fiction, part literary criticism, all serving the novelist's larger exploration of questions like "What is a family and how does it shape who we become?" and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. After great pain, a formal feeling comes. " The narrator is still figuring out how to tell the story of her family, but also her own story, on every page. It's a coming of age story spiked with the same brand of vitriol that springs up from works like Greta Gerwig's

The story starts with one account of how her parents met from her mother's point of view and then quickly doubles back and retells the story from her father's. It's from this impasse - two adamant perspectives of reality, that the narrator comes into being, always between two nodes of truth. Her mother thinks she met her husband when he tried to jump off a bridge while her father thinks they met when he saved her from a robbery. Jumping back and forth between these two alleged origins, finally, the narrator's own truth emerges.

There is another layer to the disputes about which account of the story is fact and which is fiction. Her parents are deaf, and the communication in the household is fraught. Sometimes this leads to hilarious miscommunications between them and their daughter, but other times it's rather painful: "they didn't know the meaning of the words 'I love you,' so they didn't use them." The narrator learns that their inability to communicate with each other led to the collapse of their marriage: "By day my father built houses; by night he wrecked marriages."

Even more, the narrator and her brother have not learned sign language. It's as if everyone in the house has developed their own way of interacting with the world. It's only through living, both within and outside of the household, that the narrator can discover who she truly is, unbound from family myth. Once she's set in motion at the start of the story like a top spinning out over a flat surface, as she lives more and endures more pain, becomes her own person. The novel's structural perspective starts to spin off into new directions, the narrator has finally paved her own way.

"The vertigo of events that's been left behind but has no relation to me, in spite of carrying my name." Both bound to her family by blood and by heritage, she is both of and not of them. This comes into play later as she grows further apart from her family. At one point when her father has to undergo a serious operation, she asks "How can we suffer for someone when all we really share is a biological intimacy?" It's this "duty" to family that Durastanti's narrator is fascinated by and asks the question of whether we can truly ever be absolved of our roots entirely, even as hard as we try.

But even as much as the narrator wants to strike out and be on her own "everywhere I went, I sensed rage and longing. An obsessive, hammering sense of change," forging her own path, untied to any referential connection to the people who made her, she's still uneasy out there, alone. Do we ever truly feel comfortable being ourselves? I laughed out loud when I read the narrator mention the place where she feels the most sane: "I only truly felt comfortable at the hair salon."

The book is a series of snapshot moments in the young woman's life. Stories of adolescence, love, and pain. The novel shifts ahead and back in time, the way memory often changes and slips over past memories and traumas. As she ages, events from her past take on new meaning, and they color the way she interacts with the world as she grows. For all her growth and the specific influences on her - punk music "back when I believed an album could turn me into a different person," moving to New York, growing up with a Donald before there ever existed a President Trump, living in England, Brexit, reading novels, she is shaped by the capitalist machine. She is also fascinated with the idea of a family, what it is and how it works. "The story of a family is more like a map than a novel, and an autobiography is the summation of all the geologic ages you've passed through."

The narrator struggles to formulate what self identity is. She is imprinted by the people who came before her, as she also aims to become her own, untethered to the past. Still, she knows that the conditions under which she was born, that she had left Italy behind and lived instead in America, inevitably shaped who she has and continued to become. What if it had been different, she wonders? "What would have happened to me if I'd been born someplace else, someplace at war [... ] Would I also have voted badly, to make America Great again? To emigrate means to live with all these self-ifs and hope that none of them get the upper hand."

The summation of a life cannot merely be relegated to familial origins, though, as Strangers I Know aims to show. Durastanti's narrator probes at the very idea that life itself cannot be captured fully - even in the pages of a book. For all the narrator does by hurtling against time, fighting back against the gravitational pull of her family's legacy, and the trauma carried forward into their future but also her own future. For all the ways she strikes out and makes this life of hers her very own, a grim and sardonic rhetoric emerges towards the end of the book:

"When we die, maybe on our tombstone they'll write a loved one's name, what profession we had, a line from a favorite book."

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Claudia Durastanti's 'Strangers I Know' Is an Exploration of Family and Becoming

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I have sat at this particular dinner table. Everyone's yelling. The shouts, the cross-examinations, the retorts hurl over the tablecloth, colliding into each other, the impact of the blast sending them careening off in new directions. Someone is listening to the story, but gets offended by it halfway through.

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The Years by Annie Ernaux  (currently reading)

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The Years by Annie Ernaux  (currently reading)

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''She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.”

''We scribbled down writers’ reflections on life, discovered the joys of describing ourselves to ourselves with shimmering turns of phrase, ‘existence is to drink oneself without thirst.’ We were overcome by nausea and a feeling of the absurd.”

“At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we're told to think - no less by books or ads in the metro than by funny stories - are other things that society hush up without knowing it is doing so. thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognised at last, while underneath other silences start to form.''

''When I write I do not have the impression of looking inside me, I look inside a memory ''

Ernaux has gained a long and communal perspective. She reminds us that we are material beings, and that we remember in and with the body. And our communal memory makes us part of one body.’

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or once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature - only the 17th woman out 119 laureates in the award's history.

The Swedish Academy is famous for its secrecy and its often apparently obscure choices. The October announcement frequently has journalists and editors frantically Googling that year's recipient - and perhaps a decade ago, Annie Ernaux might have received the same treatment. But, while her work has been well known and well received in France since the 1970s, and published in English translation from 1991, it is only since around 2019, when The Years, her monumental work of fiction-memoir was shortlisted for the International Booker prize, that Ernaux has made a big impact on the anglophone world.

The Years covers six decades of social and personal history, from Ernaux's working-class childhood in wartime and postwar Normandy - where she was born in 1940 - through the 1968 student uprisings, initial joy and later disillusionment during the long presidency of François Mitterand in the 1980s and 90s and on into the new millennium. It spans politics, literature, music, television, education, marriage, divorce, advertisements, popular slogans - all recounted through a narrator who never once uses the word "I'.

The book, which ends in 2006, was celebrated in France as a modern In Search of Lost Time. In terms of prose style, however, Ernaux has little in common with the more flamboyant Proust - her writing is more austere, the sensuality more analytical. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate - but also impersonal and detached. The Nobel committee described her oeuvre on Thursday as "uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean."

Nowhere is uncompromising style more apparent than in Ernaux's account of the illegal abortion she had in 1963 as a student in Rouen. This episode of her life, which first appeared as the short, sharp book Happening inFrance in 1999, was crafted - like much of Ernaux's work - from the diaries she kept at the time. Her family was solidly religious, and Ernaux was the first to attend university. Matter-of-factly she states: "Sex had caught up with me, and I saw the thing growing inside me as stigma of social failure."

The sense of shame, of the intransigent hierarchy of society, abounds in her brilliant scrutiny of her father's life, A Man's Place, first published in 1983. Ernaux's father died two months after she passed her teaching exams. (She would go on to teach in schools and university, from 1977-2000, alongside writing books.) A Man's Place is very much part of what Ernaux calls the "lived dimension of history" - it is dispassionate about the life of a working-class man of his time, a struggling grocer with minimal education: "no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony," she warns us. Similarly, her brief, electric, I Remain in Darkness, about her mother's dementia and subsequent death, with Ernaux by now divorced and middle-aged, is - while neutrally and starkly written - saturated throughout with a daughter's grief.

Passion and grief often exist side by side. Ernaux's twin books Simple Passion - the story of her affair with a younger, married Soviet attaché in Paris in the months before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and her most recently published English translation, Getting Lost, the diary of that affair, are incendiary works which remind us how close we are in life to death - whether it be morally, physically, existentially. Margaret Drabble has commented that "Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir's role of chronicler to a generation" - now the great chronicler been justly rewarded with the greatest of literature prizes.

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Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate's greatest works

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or once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature - only the 17th woman out 119 laureates in the award's history.

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 The Lexicon of the Mouth by Brandon LaBelle 

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 The Lexicon of the Mouth by Brandon LaBelle 

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I am interested in oral storytelling, and how stories are passed down by the spoken word. This of course, is all able to happen because of the mouth. In the LaBelle’s work he explores sound and how the mouth is the oral cavity is the central channel by which self and surrounding are brought into relation. The oral cavity is posed as an impressionable arena, susceptible to all types of material input, contamination and intervention, while also enabling powerful forms of resistance, attachment and conversation, as well as radical imagination.

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Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary
Bloomsbury, New York, 2014

Lexicon of the Mouth surveys the oral cavity as the central channel by which self and surrounding are brought into relation. Questions of embodiment and agency, attachment and loss, incorporation and hunger, locution and the non-sensical are critically examined. In doing so, LaBelle emphasizes the mouth as a vital conduit for negotiating "the foundational narrative of proper speech." Lexicon of the Mouth aims for a viscous, poetic and resonant discourse of subjectivity, detailed through the "micro-oralities" of laughing and whispering, stuttering and reciting, eating and kissing, among others. The oral cavity is posed as an impressionable arena, susceptible to all types of material input, contamination and intervention, while also enabling powerful forms of resistance, attachment and conversation, as well as radical imagination. argues for the revolutionary promise of the laugh, the spirited mythologies of the whisper, the schizophonics of self-talk, and the primal noise of gibberish, suggesting that the significance of voicing is fundamentally bound to the exertions of the mouth. Subsequently, assumptions around voice and vocality are unsettled in favor of an epistemology of the oral, highlighting the acts of the tongue, the lips and the throat as primary mediations between interior and exterior, social structures and embodied expressions. LaBelle makes a significant contribution to currents in sound and voice studies by reminding that to hear the voice, and to consider a politics of speech, is first and foremost to assume the mouth.

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Lexicon of the Mouth surveys the oral cavity as the central channel by which self and surrounding are brought into relation. Questions of embodiment and agency, attachment and loss, incorporation and hunger, locution and the non-sensical are critically examined. In doing so, LaBelle emphasizes the mouth as a vital conduit for negotiating "the foundational narrative of proper speech."

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This short essay discusses on the reliability of conceptualising biographical events, as Carrigan argues that we often focus on what happens during a particular event and often fail to reflect and ask ourselves, why and how it occurred. I feel as though this approach to bringing ‘biography’ into social science research is pointless as it will always be jaded with subjectivity that will fail to look at the casual factors involved with understanding events in different orders.

‘’My claim is that human beings must be understood as spatio-temporally situated objects contributing to an event’’ –  I find some academics approach to understanding personal life events so two dimensional and out of touch with the point of retelling life events.

If we were to take the approach of writing a biography through a properly ‘conceptualised approach’ it would be incredibly boring and no one would want to engage.

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One of the arguments I've tried to make with my PhD is that any approach which seeks to use the individual life course as a unit of analysis needs to be extremely careful about how biographical events are conceptualised. This issue can seem strikingly unproblematic when considered in the context of our lives - stuff happens...

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Zami: A new Spelling of my name: A biomythography 

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Zami: A new Spelling of my name: A biomythography 

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This biomythography as Audre Lorde defines her work as, is one of my favourite books, for her deeply moving personal account of her life.

I like how she uses the term ‘biomythography’ as she believes her work does not conform to simply a myth, biography or historical memoir, but instead deserves its own genre. I think this rejection of conforming to a simple ‘biography’ Is something that rings true to in what I set out to explore in my FMP, as interpreting our life through stories often holds an unreliable element, that may or may not be conscious but is undeniably present.

‘’I have always wanted to be both man and woman...to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and be entered--to leave and to be left--to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.”

“The physical realities of the dingy bus slid away from me. I suddenly stood upon a hill in the centre of an unknown country, hearing the sky fill with a new spelling of my own name.”

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I think it’s one of life’s simplest and most substantial ironies that children will only ever know their parents as adults. To a child, the concept that a parent was ever their age is baffling, while for parents it can often seem like they’ve barely crossed the threshold into adulthood. Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman brilliantly bridges the barrier established between generations, generously illustrating the power of empathy when it comes to understanding our forebears. This task is aided by a little dose of the supernatural, giving us the feeling that we’ve entered the realm of childhood, that magical place where you can travel through time.

Time is in many ways the subject of Petite Maman, which opens with the ticking of a clock, suggesting an almost stillness reminiscent of a childlike imagination of how time is perceived, with the Nelly spending her days coming up with different ways to occupy herself. I think the closeness between the two girls fills the gap between Nelly’s desire to understand why her mother has left her, without the child Marion ever telling her. In Nelly’s case it is never actually revealed why her mother is depressed or must leave, but through the games the girls play, and the way Nelly observes her mother and grandmother she later understands on some level why her mother might do the things she does. Despite the film being a highly optimistic and fantastical sketch of what closure might look like for a child searching for answers from their mother, it is charming nonetheless and a touching interrogation into intergenerational dynamics, grief and mother daughter bonds.

Some quotes I enjoyed from the film:

‘’You know a secret…a secret it’s not necessarily something you want to hide. It’s just you don’t have anyone to tell them to’’.

‘’Because you’re unhappy…you’re not often so glad to be around’’

‘’Really?....You didn’t invent my sadness’’

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This film does a lot with very little- the narrative that plays out after a father and son hand out wedding initiations over the course of the day is something that everyone can relate to in one way or another, particularly in the relational dynamics between the adult child who has moved away from home and had his father who has lived in the same place his whole life. I thought that the little knowledge we have of the mother’s decision to leave was effective in highlighting the grey area of topics that families often choose not to speak about.

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Bob Marley - Tear Gassed In Zimbabwe  1980