The Perfume Recordist scents herself into sounding and sounds herself in scenting.
The Perfume Recordist is an encounter between Lisa Robertson and Stacy Doris across countries (Canada, USA, France), across senses and perceptions, across technological devices, across kitchen tables.
The Perfume Recordist field records, manifests, performs.
The Perfume Recordist is not interested in the fallacies of origins and the intrinsic essence of things but in the layered odour of momentous existence, in the whiff of an ear, in the noisy bouquet of a city’s undergarments.
N. S., Nathalie Stephens, Nathanaël composes in English and French, sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in the permeable ache between, amidst multiple voiced and embodied pronouns, and in the space of in-between, which she calls l’entre genre. As preposition, entre, can mean between or among, as prefix, it can denote the idea of reciprocity or of being in the middle of two things, as verb, to enter, to go into, to begin. As well, genre does not only signify a category of artistic composition or literature, but also a general kind or type. Biologically it also refers to genus; linguistically to gender. As such, Stephens enters this space of in-between-kind not to occupy what we may easily confuse at first as a binary (poetry/prose, English/French, female body/male body) but rather to explore the porosity between multiple genres, languages, bodies, voices. In the porosity, a dislocation; in the dislocation unease; in the unease a fruitful and unexpected altering.
In her work, Stephens troubles the idea of the singular mother tongue, singular body, singular place/home, singular desire. The tongue of her language is neither and both English and French, for her vocabulary may at times look like one but be syntactically the other, or sound like one but be the other, or behave like one but shadow the other.
Jordan Scott’s blert, simply put, is a book about stuttering that stutters. Which in fact means that it is anything but simple. blert is a mouth that mouths me as I mouth its phonemes with my mouth. It is intensely physical, clinical and my mouth becomes both hyper personal and treacherous.
“Imitate: frazil ice. Say clacra, frazil ice, clacracla.
Imitate: muskoxen. Say flafra, muskoxen, flafrafla.” (Jordan Scott, blert)
I imitate and my utterance “fails.” Or does it? For how can an utterance fail or succeed. Doesn’t an utterance just utter? Don’t all mouths approximate the sounds of other mouths? And yet we place so much judgement on accents, speech discordances, lisps, stammers, stutters, even pitch and gender. In these judgements we fable, much as the fables of cures for stuttering that blert dissects:
“The chichara has to sing inside the mouth… You will learn to use your mouth.” “You will lunge your thorax unto spring… You will sing like the birds.” “If you wish to become an eloquent speaker, you should bury the hyoid bone of a lamb in the wall of your house.” “You will learn to eat your grasshoppers.”
At one time or another, Erín Moure has inhabited and continues to inhabit the localities of many subjectivity-figures, including Erin Mouré, Eirin Moure, Elisa Sampedrín, a plethora of medieval Iberian troubadours, the fervent person that is Fernando Pessoa that is Alberto Caeiro, Nicole Brossard, Chus Pato, Andrés Ajens, Nichita Stănescu, Paul Celan, Louise Dupré, more philosophers than can be listed here, and even Oana Avasilichioaei.
And as with all localities, these localities also come with their own histories, cultures and languages, including English, French, Galician, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian, which Moure traverses not with ease, but responsibly, as responsive citizen. “To connect is so unconquerable a citizen only a gift may vibrate.” (O Cidadán) Moure’s work demands that we discover where in the disconnect between two languages can one connect; can one gift one language with the contours of the other language; can one shape a subject with a gesture of the other subject.
Donato Mancini folds musicality and time into his visual textual work, a work that is gestural, visually stimulating, performative, and participatory.
Mancini’s writing (and here I include his visual poetry which I insist is writing) aggregates, building out of recognizable typographical signs and symbols new structures on the page, structures which seem to move, which seem to speak. How am I asked to see? How am I asked to read? How am I asked to voice?
Folding Borders: Experimenting in the Canadian Laboratory