as the past. Art that bears the past’s residues is often nostalgic for what Fisher calls “lost futures,” for the utopias we once believed in, once strived for, until they were foreclosed by capitalism, sexism, racism, and other structural violences. A kind of ethical persistence sits at the heart of hauntology. “It is about refusing to give up the ghost,” Fisher writes, “or— and this can sometimes amount to the same thing—the refusal of the ghost to give up on us.” 2 Capitalism and sexism push us toward resignation: they breed by making us believe that there simply is no other way to be. But by refusing to give up on the ghost, we open up possibilities assumed to be precluded. Fisher never directly invokes the writing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in his work, and I believe the inverse is true for her as well. But her theory of reparative reading, in my eyes, can deepen our understanding of Fisher’s hauntology. Contra the paranoid point of view, which stakes its claim in exposure, the reparative stakes its claim in hope. “Hope,” per Sedgwick, is “often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience.” Yet its energies position us to “realize that the future may be different from the present.” 3 Hope makes it possible for us to entertain “such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.” 4 Much art and writing aims to reveal the various ways society is inhospitably constructed. But for Sedgwick, this work is not enough. With acute sensitivity, she beckons us to collect the fragments left over from this violence in order to build a more just future. This is precisely what Wong does in her multimedia installation Mending Body/Mending Mind (2024). More than any other work in her oeuvre, it reckons with the ghost of her mother. For the first time, Wong explicitly addresses the violent act that she now realizes has haunted her work for over thirty years: her mother’s rape by knifepoint in their Florida home.
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2 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Winchester, U.K.: Zer0 Books, 2022), 22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performa- tivity (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 146. 3
Mending Body/Mending Mind consists of three core components: a multi-panel textile installation, a two-channel video created in collaboration with Wong’s husband, the experimental filmmaker Al Wong, and a speculative poem and sound composition by Aya Karpin´ska. The textile panels, suspended from the ceiling at different angles, greet the viewer when they first enter the room. Fabric squares of varying transparencies and sheens are sewn together to create pieces haunted by domesticity—were they not too lightweight to provide warmth, one might assume they were quilts. Their palette tends toward the pastel, with white being the primary hue. Most of the panels are sliced through the center or marked by other excisions. These cuts enable them to fold and flow, to gently sway as viewers move in and out of the installation. But they are also shaded by violence —for the act of cutting is a destructive one. Al Wong’s videos are projected through the fabric installation. The panels interrupt each image, creating another form of visual slicing. One motif in the video brings this sublimated violence to the fore. A disembodied hand wields metal scissors to cut through a bolt of heavy grey fabric. The fabric is seen in another close-up shot, though this time it is being stitched by a sewing machine. As the needle repeatedly stabs the fabric, it sets a steady tempo like a metronome. Mending Body/Mending Mind privileges the kind of intimacy that close-ups afford. This intimacy is replicated in the sound installation. Karpin´ska’s composition must be heard via headphones connected to a handheld audio player. Speaking in dialogue, she and Wong seem to be whispering directly into the listener’s ear. The poem imagines a conversation between Wong and her mother, whom Karpin´ska ventriloquizes. She speaks in hushed fragments. This is no ordinary hurt . Knife at my throat . In my own home . And yet, the central trauma is never directly named. For all of the ways it attempts to conjure intimacy,
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Ibid.
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Elizabeth Wiet
Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology
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