Reflection on Interrupteur

As the outward facing part of my Interrupteur residency at Jessop West as part of the Humanities department of the University of Sheffield draws to a close there is time to reflect on the experience. This residency has been invaluable, allowing me to reflect on how this type of network practice might reveal something about the theoretical research I have been doing might be enacted in the world. 

I am overwhelmed by the generosity of spirit shown by the artists, interrupters, and academics who have helped to make the residency successful. Dialogues across disciplines and institutions have been productive in so many ways and it has been possible to push practice forward as a way of thinking through material in a way that has revealed so much for my own practice, but I hope also for the other people who have been involved.

Images from the residency have been used to visualise some of the connections and lines of flight we engaged in while we cut together-apart using practice.

Acknowledgements:

Huge thanks go out to all the people involved with making this Residency both possible and successful. In particular, Amanda Crawley Jackson for her vision and support in making this all possible, Amy Ryall for her help in organising and the logistics, the Porters team at Jessop West, especially Roger who has been a great help, Brian Lewis from Longbarrow Press for his hard work on the postcard design, Sharon Kivland my PhD supervisor for always pushing me, all the brilliant artists who gave generously of their time: Emma Bolland, Madeleine Walton, Clee Claire Lee, Bryan Eccleshall, Jo Ray, Helen Frank, Andrew Conroy, The Roland Barthes Reading Group, and Louise Finney, the academics who are currently developing new projects the artists, and lastly all the interrupters who were diverted from their intended path through the foyer and engaged in interesting conversations, in particular Joe Edwardes-Evans, Martin Elms and Brian Lewis who became our most regular and welcome interrupters.

Residency Day 9 - Work in progress

Interruptions from Day 9

Residency day 9

Drawing, mapping, diagramming, exploring the gap between the location and the representation:

An experimentation in contact with the real. The map […] constructs the unconscious

I will be in Jessop West Foyer all day for the last time.

Louise Finney and I will be engaged in collaboratively mapping the Jessop West foyer and beyond. 

We will employ a range of drawing techniques, archeological mapping methods, rhizomatic mapping, and notations of interruptions experienced while working in the foyer. 

This will result in constructing a record of the space that is beyond the expectations of the traditional map or territory 

Come and see what we are up to, interrupt, and join in

Reading and counting using our fingers in order to find the haiku form

Haikus and the process of finding them

Insolent in that it interrupts the text, and smitten in that it keeps returning to it

Joining Rachel Smith, from 1-3pm, the Roland Barthes reading group will read their found haikus produced using text appropriated from Barthes’s ‘The Desire for Haiku’, a chapter in Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel, The collection, The Desire for Haiku, has been recently published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. (The current group includes the artists and doctoral students Emma Bolland, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Sharon Kivland, Debbie Michaels, Bernadette O’ Toole, Rachel Smith, and is convened by Sharon Kivland).

Following the readings those joining or interrupting are invited to read, and to find their own haikus through further appropriation.

Interruptions from the morning of Residency day 8

An interruption made around language, rhizomatic thinking, music lyrics and birthday possibilities 

Helen Clark joins Andrew Conroy to talk photography, walking and the different positions of the flâneur and fugere, movement or stasis in spaces, class, voyeurism and cultural capital

other researchers join in the discussions

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

Andrew Conroy will be joining me in Jessop West Foyer today 10.30-12.30 to talk about his photography projects. Walking the Railways and the Coalfields of South Yorkshire and finding a path through the social landscape 

Please come and interrupt our conversation and join in

Andrew Conroy is a curator, writer, lecturer, and photographer. He is interested in the connections and disconnections between space, place, identity, and capital.

@andrewdconroy

Interruptions on Day Seven

Interruptions aplenty from a range of people and disciplines today.

Conversations about paradigms, the multiplicity of meaning, the need to push fixed ideas around towards matters of concern

Talking and writing haikus, exploring ideas around found language, reading in public spaces and performative acts

Engaged in constraint based processes

Conversations about the productive space of a foyer, the unexpected encounter, how to push our thinking into new spaces 

Historical ghosts, musical hall, performative acts and how our expectations can be challenged or disrupted

Following the constraint, but pushing the rules

 Haikus found in the books of Rachel Smith, typed by Brian Lewis from Longbarrow Press

Thanks to everyone who stopped by today for lot of interesting and productive interruptions

See you tomorrow

Residency Day 7

Helen Frank, busy working through constraint. 

Pushing language to its limit of comprehensibility. 

Asemic words, redrawing the produced shapes

Discussions around cutting together-apart, Schrodinger's cat, many worlds theory, and the things that exist between the hyphen. (The joining action of artistic collaboration - reaching across the gap to form a practice in the space between)