| art.description.project | The project was first proposed for the peer-reviewed conference ”Repetition/s: Performance and Philosophy”, a collaboration between the University of Ljubljana and Ljubljana City Museum (where it was installed/exhibited) in September 2016; it was subsequently included in the open-call exhibition ”Action Weeks” at A-venue in Göteborg, in October 2016.
The Ljubljana program text:
The Talking Cure is a sound installation, which combines critical reflection, poetic writing and personal narrative to explore the repetitive nature of the experience of loss as it is conceived in psychoanalytic terms. Invoking the Freudian concepts of Wiederholungszwang and Trauerarbeit in tension, the piece investigates the role that repetition, repression, and return play in pathologized responses to loss as well as in idealized dramaturgies of grief and mourning. The Talking Cure draws on the musical as well as psychiatric sense of fugue – a canonic form of contrapuntal composition in which themes and figures unfold through a process of transposition and return, and a period of reversible amnesia – to explore notions of flight and chase (the etymological basis of the term fugue) both as formal principle and as a question of content or subject matter. Playing to an audience of one, it dwells on the act of listening, exploring intimacy and solitude as aspects of the relationality of grief.
The A-venue program text:
The Talking Cure is a sound installation for an audience of one, which attempts to render, in poetic form, the theorization within Freudian psychoanalysis of the repetitive nature of the experience of loss. Through a contrapuntal layering of voices, using various forms of iteration and citation, The Talking Cure compels the listener to reflect on the tension between theory and personal experience, between repeating and remembering, and on the manner in which language both enables and confines the subject.
Influenced by Judith Butler’s feminist reading of Freudian melancholia, in which the incorporation or disavowal of loss is deemed constitutive in subject formation in ways that are intrinsically related to Butler’s conception of performativity, The Talking Cure explores the relationship between the (pathologized) compulsion to repeat, the (idealized) ”working through” of Freudian Trauerarbeit, and loss as a process of transformation.
Additionally, the piece draws on the musical as well as psychiatric sense of fugue – a canonic form of contrapuntal composition in which themes and figures unfold through a process of transposition and return, and a period of reversible amnesia – to explore notions of flight and chase (the etymological basis of the term fugue) both as formal principle and as a question of content or subject matter.
Duration:18’23”, looped. | sv |
