Overview, Images

A sonorous draft; a lexicon of windjamming Publication

Abbra Kotlarczyk

Part I

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Continuing the artist's investigation into expanded modes of publication, A sonorous draft; a lexicon of windjamming is the first in a three part installation reading room series and eventual publication on labour and genealogy. Part one opens up to non-conventional forms of kinship and sound-perception as a queer strategy for displacing the visual (as akin to the biological) gaze. It employs hybrid narrative strategies to frame a break with the traditional family tree, situating expanded imaginings for togetherness through modes of botanical drift, co-constitution, biotic "rubbings" and through a cross-pollination of intimate contact zones for queer relationality and resistance. Starting from the premise of a lexical body of inheritance in the passing down of a family name in the absence of a bloodline, the sonic imaging of a six week journey at sea in which my grandfather taught himself the English language becomes a seeding event for a deep web of connections across times and geo-political coordinates.

Rather than framed as an essay—an attempt—this work is a draft: it is an ongoing state of becoming; a play on words to suggest that the air that endlessly moves around us also creates the conditions and climates for the trajectories of our entangled lives.

Download the full text as a PDF above; read an excerpt below:

from east to west, i daily kiss the deep scattering layer with the rime of my complexion

Littoral denotes the zone of the seashore between high- and low-water marks, or the zone near a lake shore with rooted vegetation.

we are the heir of this syncopatic, symptomatic slow dance as if for hundreds of years we have been expected to perform the erotic desires of humans to be moved from ‘a’ to ‘b’ fraught decks used to stash the lootings of colonial treasures in stolen goods instruments aiding those so-called “discoveries”

i’m not hot for you, you know?

you don’t know you don’t see any of this, least of all you don’t hear it those spiralling cavities of your cochlea—snail shell or screw—attune to a helical i, rather than a chord; a plateau of long libidinal longing

 

the energy of your earthly dramas lifts me, heaves me, courtesy of the elements, increases in severity relative to the warming of the planet by carbon emission the unrelenting, unbelieving of rising sea levels that my internal monologue records with each passing phase of denial i have met the melting ice caps and they are warming to feverish pitch, fuming red from embarrassment they blush, but not out of any kind of flattery for man, foolhardy that he is

DZIUNAY, Katherina: Ukrainian

Reference: 3222901

Genus: Acacia
Vernacular: acacia
Accessions: 374
Species: 88
Taxa: 107

Abbra Kotlarczyk (based Naarm/Melbourne) maintains a research-based practice that is articulated through modes of conceptual art making and writing of criticism, poetry and prose. She is a freelance academic editor for socially-engaged artistic research and practice as well as an independent curator. Her practice is hinged on visual and linguistic inquiries that often take place trans-historically through expanded notions of care, queerness, publication, citizenry and embodied poetics.
Born 1984, Mullumbimby, Arakwal country, so-called Australia.
Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, so-called Australia.

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Working on unceded sovereign land of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, Blindside pays respect to Elders, past, present and emerging.