Cone
– Can you describe how you produced the text and how it relates to the Conic Trilogy?
– Yes, if there’s a way of working with video that explores aspects of narrative fragmentation through the juxtaposition of what might appear to be diverse and unrelated video imagery, if that’s a part of what’s going on in the Conic Trilogy, then there’s a way of writing in relation to the work by mirroring the process, doing so with literary material.
– I see. And portions of text have been chosen from diverse but particular sources then subjected to a minimal rewriting?
– That’s right, so that while the peculiarities of style or voice in each piece is retained…
– [simultaneously] …their divergence on the level of explicit content is minimised.
– The rewriting has involved very little alteration…
– Well, some parts, certainly. The passages are used as starting points for further writing with the basic parameter that each original passage is treated as a viewpoint in a landscape allowing a performative writing act like a body turning through degrees of the compass to describe what is in the proximity.
– From an initially descriptive mode, the developed writing is allowed to deviate, but is terminated before a new voice becomes too clearly established.
– And the writing is carried out with performance/reading in mind?
– That’s right – which is to say its rhythms are built for the speed of a speaking voice. But the text works on another level of experimentation
– again, relating back to the video work
– where the various passages are allowed to interrupt each other...
– ...perhaps by an overlapping of voices and modulation of the speeds of reading using chance to both underscore and score through the writing’s images. The idea is to find new materialities of the text and to propose that, just as the mode of the videos’ editing might expose new visualities,
a relation between writing and (video) image is opened, which does not prescribe an order of relations or a kind of critique between image and text in advance.
– So The reading/performance could be thought of as a kind of diagramming?
– Maybe so, in the same way that words under erasure are diagrams: partially indiscernible text becoming discernible again, but in unexpected ways.
Neil Chapman in response to Nooshin Farhid’s ‘Conic Trilogy’
Performance/ Reading: Nooshin Farhid with Neil Chapman
2011 - Con, Banner Repeater, London
