The rapacious biographical fallacy takes license to speculate, invents identity, curates a mythology to mourn. Biography is a house museum. Magnetised between remembering and forgetting, biographical riddles figure sightings of self and other, willing or unwilling companions. Lyrical, mediated, mythologised, departed from real life, biographical fictioning knows subjectivity as diverse, provisional and intersubjective. The artists and writers gathered in this collection follow from two masterclasses presented by Art Writing at The Glasgow School of Art in 2022. Each session invited participants to consider how biomythography, or biographical fiction-ing and related approaches, allow for generative, radically subjective narratives in response to ‘real’ or ‘factual’ historical and contemporary events in our own lives and the lives of others. The (auto)biographical is not absolute. It is, by necessity, provisional, unanchored and contingent.
This is not a biography*, Laura Haynes
A Tale vs a Life, Kate Briggs
Quinton, Kat Chimonides
Machine Body Swamp, Kate Power
A Broken Mirror, Esther Draycott
Near and Deep as the Thunder Crashed, Laurence Figgis
Stereoscope, Kate Timney
Geology, Alice Hill-Woods
Here in a Glasgow Tenement – not asleep, not awake either-, Michael Pedersen
Of Fuck Up, Michael Pedersen
They Thin, Nicky Coutts
Lone Spoke Lashes, Sara O’Brien
Unwilling Companion, Laura Haynes
In this Other Tongue, María Garay Arriba
Cutting Strings, Sarah Long
Top 10 Films, Stephen Sutcliffe
A Rally to You, Athene Greig
You Cooled My Heart That Burned With Longing, Emma Aars
(Re)membering, Rebecca Fortnum