THIS EDITION IS LIMITED TO 200 COPIES., HEAD, Geneve, Geneva School of Art and Design; Wits School of Art, 2016, landscape format, illustrated, spiral binding, 29.8 cms x 21 cms x 1cms, condition: as new.
Poetics of Relation has been a collaboration between Uriel Orlow and Bettina Malcomess with 16 artists and postgraduate students from Work.Master program at HEAD, University of the Arts, Geneva, and the Division of Visual Arts (DIVA) at the Wits School of Arts (WSOA), Johannesburg.
The project took Edouard Glissants book, The Poetics of Relation as a starting point to work with the aesthetics and politics of movement, exploring relational and errant forms of identity, language and image making. Poetics of Relation began with a week of events in Johannesburg in February 2015, including a workshop on phonetics, a jamming session with censored records, lectures on mapping and communal walks, experiments and presentations. The exchange continued over email, Facebook, Dropbox and Skype over the last few months, producing several collaborative projects and intersections. Finally this culminated in the exhibition, Poetics of Relation/Slippery Sessions, at LiveInYourHead, Geneva. Here the collaborations were opened up to further dialogue with invited artists Érik Bullot and Nicoline van Harskamp.
The publication is not a record of the exhibition and exchange, but rather an evocation of the slipperiness of relation. It suggests the elusiveness of closure but also the continual evocation of potentials and possibilities for identity, becoming, connection and language, as well as inevitable gaps and distancings.
Simon Acevedo, Denise Bertschi, Antonia Brown, Érik Bullot, Nolan Dennis, Leonard de Muralt, Abri de Swardt, Ravi Govender, Paul Guian, Ciel Grommen, Mbali Khoza, Murray Kruger, Bettina Malcomess, Nare Mokgotho, Michelle Monareng, Uriel Orlow, Philip Pilekjaer, Nathalie Rebholz, Julie Sas, Tali Serruya, Mounia Steimer, Nicoline van Harskamp.
In Poetics of Relation, French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the islands of the Antilles as enduring an "invalid" suffering imposed by history, yet also as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture in order to provide forms of memory and intent capable of transcending "nonhistory", Glissant therefore defines his "poetics of relation" - both aesthetic and political - as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. In Poetics of Relation, we come to see that relation in all its senses - telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings - is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. The issues raised about identity as built in relation and not in isolation are central to current discussions not only of Caribbean creolization but of U.S. multiculturalism as well.
