Introducing the GUEST (part 1)
A trouble of not writing the blog from the first day of my job is that I have accumulated so many notes and thoughts that the very burden of them prevents me from starting to write. Paradox, hey!?
The inherent paradox of writing a Blog, on the other hand, (which I reflected on in my previous writings on the project Clothes for Death www.a-n.co.uk/p/384946), is that it is a public space for what usually are quite private and sensitive insights and how to negotiate these spaces in myself, inner-outer, private-public, what do I want to share and in what way?
I’ve been also pondering about the constructed nature of blogging, and its relationship to ‘documentary’ modes of images making – I see the parallel where both on the surface seem ‘naturalistic’ and spontaneous, but in fact, like everything else are edited, constructed and on one level fictional. It is the fictional that has been intriguing me more and more, in relation to my practice and to the practice of anthropologists/sociologists/ ethnographers (hope they don’t mind me bracketing them so closely). I recall a conversation with an anthropologist, who told me that when he is doing ‘fieldwork’ he almost becomes another person, more outgoing, listening intently to what others are saying.
I can relate to that space and the persona one adopts, as in some of my work I directly engage with people, either to photograph or interview them. This ‘guest’ space has allowed me to adopt an inner new position, and from this new space, listen more intently. It is as if I park my usual everyday self, with its insistence on self-referencing aside, in order to truly hear this person, for who and what they are, without ‘me’ in the way. Working for example with my mother and grandmother, on some of my previous project, this positioning created a space for listening them and allowing them to be who they are, in a way pausing the learnt reactions, accumulated from the past. Perhaps, it is a way of pausing time, the past, and letting the present in.
It may sound deceptively easy when written like this, but the boundary of the ‘ethnographer’ self, ‘artist’ self, and all the other ones, ‘daughter’, etc, are fluid, and in constant negotiation. It is these negotiations of power, (mis)understandings, language, translation, and ultimetly representation, that I am interested in.
