it is this it is this, it is this
A portrait of Margaret Tait

Transcript of performative video-essay by Laura Edbrook & Sarah Forrest.

Script developed from dialogue between Edbrook, Forrest, and Margaret Tait’s conversational notes on the unpublished manuscripts “The Lilywhite Boys” and “Personae.”

It is this it is this, it is this considers the manner of closeness to and distance from in Tait’s writing and filmmaking—a close looking, or a scouring, where Tait uniquely captures the quotidian but consistently resists the autobiographical.

With thanks to Orkney Library & Archive, MAP Magazine, Suzanne van der Lingen, Claire Walsh and Dr. Sarah Neely for their generous support of this work.

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Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? is an annotation and reflection on the two-chapter eponymous exhibition and event project that took place at Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee in Scotland between October 2016 – March 2017, curated by Sophia Yadong Hao.

The core of the publication is constituted by material presented and performed by over thirty thinkers, art historians, artists, writers and poets at the project’s culminating symposium, 12-Hour Action Group alongside important historical texts by Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Monica Ross, Annabel Nicolson and others.

Resonating with the ethos of open dialogue and the experimentation of women artists’ collectives in the 1970s and 80s, Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? constructs a dynamic, open and collaborative arena that foregrounds practices of resistance, collectivity and self-organisation. Highlighting the inherent seditiousness that animates feminist thinking, the book seeks out the lodestone of a volatile politics, which calls for and instigates urgent alternatives to the cultural, political and economic machineries of power that haunt this world.