tearing air by drawing displacement in space migration | confrontation by catherine hamel
It is the violent and violated identity in particular as a source of self that seeks expression in an oscillation between performance, writing and drawing. The outcome is a cartography of the territories of experience and identity formation and fragmentation.With the complexity of post war narratives, each physical and symbolic layer alludes to another possible formulation. The body is experienced as a foolish witness forced and trained to continuously observe difficult knowledge. Particular interest lies in the traits the act of drawing share with lines of confrontation. In speaking of drawing lines of confrontation, the confrontation referred to is not one of aggressive opposition. It is the collision between modes of expression and experience that can never be perfectly matched. To confront is not always a hostile act. To confront is also an act of comparison, of consideration. The reverberation of a collision is always more interesting than the obvious explosion.
Building on the question of how we seek definitions of identity in the built environment, Tearing Air by Drawing Displacement in Space studies embodied politics through the personal experience of forced displacement and subsequent adaptation. It is the story of a body plagued by the consequences of war. Forced across lines of confrontation, it is a violent and violated body negotiating borders and boundaries. The subsequent experience of forced displacement is an unresolved existence oscillating between the dangerously manipulative memories of a lost place and the difficulty of adaptation to new cultures and their accompanying space. It is a rich existence that defies the comfort of stale meaning. Life relentlessly demands to be reinterpreted from a different point of view.
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but where is the humor?
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