Coffee Letters (extract)
Brind, Susan and Harold, Jim (2020) Coffee Letters (extract). Armarólla, 5. ISSN 2547-894X
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Creators/Authors: | Brind, Susan and Harold, Jim |
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Abstract: | This series of letters, written collaboratively by Susan Brind & Jim Harold, are extracted from an on-going larger project that goes under the working title Coffee Letters. The letters reference observations, events and encounters that have been witnessed together or individually by the artists since the turn of the 20th-21st Century. They span a period of over 20 years and the larger body of writings from which these are extracted all relate to peripheral and border locations within the UK, mainland Europe, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean region. Extracts from the body of work have been shown in the form of installations and exhibitions in Glasgow and Münich, and have been integrated as a performative element within academic conference papers in Glasgow, London and Nicosia. Events, locations, musings, and conversations recalled, are laid down on the page to ‘you’. A bond between writer(s) and reader is forged for the duration of each text, each memory. Each location or place is momentarily combined or joined as a shared experience of ‘being’ – of existential experience – that temporarily brings into proximity feelings of remoteness and closeness, of knowing and unknowability. They are, however, not complete letters. There is no direct addressee and no form of signing off. They retain a form of anonymity, both of the sender and the recipient. They are, in a very real sense, fragments of a letter, and the idea of the fragment is key to their form and intention. They are not complete moments, fully framed or brought to any conclusion. In this regard each letter becomes a moment of pause or passage between two senses of place, the one predicated by its nature as a fragment and the other by an invoked sense of loss. As such, they suggest a series of hinterland-like spaces that can only be glimpsed or glanced at. They are, too, about the world of experience and phenomena; of thought and feeling. Each text frames a moment that evolves in its own terms whilst relating to other fragments by means of the series, following an invisible line to a next, and another next, and so on, while in the process mixing connections to establish a new relation: that which resides beyond or outside of the text. |
Official URL: | http://armarolla.com/shop/issue-v-summer-2020/ |
Output Type: | Article |
Additional Information: | Other examples of Coffee Letters relating to Brind & Harold's research in Cyprus can be found in the online journal RUUKKU in their edition 'Peripheries in Artistic Research': Susan Brind, Jim Harold, Ana Souto; 'Exploring liminality in Cyprus: spaces, voices, and means of expression'. See http://ruukku-journal.fi/en |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Place, Place Identity, Conflict Zones, Border Territories, Liminality, Peripheral Spaces and Voices . |
Schools and Departments: | School of Fine Art |
Dates: | Date Date Type 19 January 2020 Accepted 29 June 2020 Published |
Status: | Published |
Related URLs: | |
Output ID: | 7168 |
Deposited By: | Susan Brind |
Deposited On: | 24 Feb 2020 11:51 |
Last Modified: | 15 Jun 2023 09:11 |