VIDEO - FAYEN D’EVIE - THE NATIONAL

Transcript

My name is Fayen d'Evie. I'm an artist based in Muckleford, which is in Dja Dja Wurrung country, north of Melbourne. And my work in The National comes out of an experience of blindness. My installation for The National is Essays in ‘Vibrational Poetics’. This consists of four different essays or attempts at writing language for a post-human audience. The materials that I've chosen depend on the different essay. In one case the essay, which engages with tactile poetics, is made from granite and Jurassic marble from bronze braille and ocher and charcoal. And these materials are chosen in particular because the granite will outlast civilization. So thinking about ways that this artwork can truly end up in the landscape. And be encountered by a post-human audience. Other materials range from, for example, another work is a choreographic work which explores the body as material. A body as a vehicle for writing. And how the body operates as embodied typography. And this is a collaboration with dancer, performance artist, Benjamin Hancock. When we first began developing this work in London, working together with another artist, a blind sculptor, Aaron McPeake who makes sculptures out of resonant bell brass. And we were working with the idea of what would vibrational poetics be if carried through the body? These ideas around touch and sensuality around slowing down, around calling attention to the crises that we're in now, this kind of precarious time. And about valuing the ways that we can acknowledge one another. The term essay, to me, not only evokes writing, but also an attempt, an essay at something. And sometimes in a multiplicity of ways. For example, in three of the works braille poetry is included. And these are intended for a post-human audience.

But of course they're also intended for an audience of our time. And the braille poetry is partly a way of me introducing an invitation to touch. But it's also a way of privileging blindness within an institution like this, where usually, blind visitors are relegated to a very secondary experience. There's one work which is a wooden box that has tactile paintings within it, and bronze braille. But it also has resonators and an earthquake simulator. Because that work investigates both audible and sub-audible frequencies. One of the works engages with tactile poetics, and in particular with ideas that I have around women being the beginning of both painting and writing in the palaeolithic caves. And I think, for me, this re-writes the history of art as beginning with women. And it's based on certain archaeological papers that have found handprints of women en masse within these caves. There's also an honouring through these works of the propositions of others that I think have been particularly revolutionary or, at least innovative and informative for my practice. For example, I include a font called Blind Words by Nuria López who's a Spanish designer. And she's developed a way that you can include both braille and printed text in the same typography. So my hope is that people enter the instillation and find their own way of engaging with the works. And then can converse with others about that.

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