Published 9.6.2021 | Updated 30.6.2021
Writing, as it moves into and through collaborative research and the construction of artwork is, in our experience, a fracturing process, a violence of somatic presence/absence that allows for correspondences between intimate space and distance, that recognizes and honors the geographical displacement and the attempted collision of digital technology and touch. We work, as collaborators, at the intersection of digital and somatic ways of knowing/accessing/presenting. Our work contains strands developed in shared spaces and apart, between Ireland and the U.S.A.—with distance sharing and re-purposing of material and the evolving ideation that has lead to a freedom from and perhaps destabilization of meaning in a traditionally academic sense. We trace the connections across specific histories, which are ongoing, where bodies and lives are disappeared by apparatuses of oppression, colonial legacies, and the extractive regimes of consumption and climate destruction. Strands of work search for their helical being-ness, looking to attach themselves to other meaningful material. We consider the ways writing moves us towards or away from each other, the other. We consider the ways words screen us and yet might offer a bridge between worlds; the way images replace words and screens disrupt the normative. We write towards touch and away from it. Touch ablates the tensions, /melts the distances. We are out of touch. So, we write. We also draw, talk, film, record and move. We position writing within a tapestry of interweaving practices, allowing writing itself to have some companionship, some kinship. Easing the burden on writing to deliver, contain, and maintain knowledge paradigms, perhaps enables understanding of knowledging as wrighting; that is, at least some of the time, creating knowing is a place of play, craft, and pleasure, even as we confront the devastating crises of the world writ large.
https://www.uniarts.fi/en/documents/michael-murphy-and-roisin-ogorman-writing-is-not-the-last-word-reflections-on-an-iterative-creative-research-project/