Abstract:
Contemporary artist Yoon Hung-Min uses language, text and writing to examine translation not as a representation of an essential origin but as a beguiling, contentious space for abstraction and emergent cultural production. Her site-specific installations, book projects and other text-based work include the wall piece ‘Backwards Metamorphosis,’ a reversed writing of Kafka’s famous novella sentence by sentence. The writing retraces Gregor’s tragedy and ends as he wakes transformed into a monstrous vermin. Like Hung-Min’s monstrous translation, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) becoming is never about imitation. Rather becoming underscores translation as metamorphoses (Braidotti, 2002); a “creation of the new rather than a repetition of the same” (p. 305). In this session on vital writing practices, I will explore a year-long artistic project I have undertaken called ‘How to Write as Felt.’ Felting is a material process whereby extreme temperatures and tensions are applied to natural fibers such as wool or hair. However, like Hung-min’s translation practice, felt cannot be reversed to its originary state but folds matter into new assemblages and topologies. Felt also implies and embodies an affective understanding of writing. As opposed to writing as a unit of language with a written representation, the artistic project ‘How to Write as Felt’ examines writing as choreographic objects, which activate movement and experimentation (Manning, 2013).