LA MECHANIQUE DES FLUIDES

If you have found this page, you scanned a bar code created for The Net Work Compendium, a 2014 curatorial project of Gretta Louw's.

With Gretta, I decided to show a very limited, altered version of my project La Mechanique Des Fluides within The Net Work Compendium as an introduction to one aspect of what I do as an artist, which is use a wide variety of engagement practices that require people to dig deeper and experience whatever theme I am exploring more viscerally.

Though posted here with audio, La Mechanique Des Fluides is typically screened silently in a public setting. Instead of recorded sound, the text is read aloud into a microphone by a volunteer from the audience. The attempt to read a rather hard to read bit of text, in front of a crowd, without rehearsal, often in the dark, while constantly looking up to see if the film has stopped playing is an integral part of the (feminist) piece.

The text is from page 112-13 of Catherine Porter's 1985 translation of Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One. It reads as follows:

"Woman never speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating, Blurring. And she is not listened to, unless proper meaning (meaning of the proper) is lost. Whence the resistances to that voice that overflows the 'subject'. Which the 'subject' then congeals, freezes, in its categories until it paralyzes the voice in its flow.

'And there you have it, Gentlemen, that is why your daughters are dumb.' Even if they chatter, proliferate pythically in works that only signify their aphasia, or in the memetic underside of your desire. And interpreting them where they exhibit only their muteness means subjecting them to a language that exiles them at an ever increasing distance from what perhaps they would have said to you, were already whispering to you. If only your ears were not so formless, so clogged with meaning(s), that they are closed to what does not in some way echo the already heard.

Outside of this volume, already circumscribed by the signification articulated in (the father's) discourse nothing is: awoman. Zone of silence."