Task 31 - You don't say
Alan writes:
Given:
- I read somewhere about a technique used by the great dramatist Bertolt Brecht to make sense of perplexing contemporary events. Confronted with the complexity of circumstances and the difficult of orientating himself in relation to them, Brecht decided to make collages of these events and circumstances in order to establish visual relationships that might, in turn, suggest conceptual relationships to enable better understanding and political action.
- One of the striking images from the last week was this visual overview of the Mueller report into Russian interference in the American presidential elections, which shows in black the ‘redacted’ (censored) sections that have not been shared with the American public.
This is your task:
Make one or more collages of drawings, photographs, writings etc. that put you into relationship with the contemporary world. Possible themes are not limited to the following:
-
- Brexit
- Our family income next year
- The crisis in Ashtanga yoga
- Lisa and gender
- My anxieties about aging and career
- Donald Trump
- Islamophobia in Danish politics
- The sexuality of pregnancy
- Living with whiteness
- The Sri Lanka bombings
- The coming climate apocalypse
Don’t restrain yourself when making the collages: represent any ‘facts’, feelings or relationships you wish, as brutally or honestly as possible. However, given that we ‘go public’ on this website on a weekly basis, I would like you to consider which elements of the collages might be inappropriate for public view. Redact these elements in some way: you might use tape, crayon, scissors, a witty emoji, whatever.
The final part of the task is to derive something from the character or appearance of the redactions. Try to answer the question: what are your poetics of redaction? Is there a beauty and a way of knowing in the act of concealing facts and relationships?