Autotheory for Mountains: land(e)scaping the self

Abstract

Vivian Darroch-Lozowski’s Voice of Hearing, 1984, begins with a narrator-unicorn; wording “creatures who are-not”. As she “shimmers” onto the page, she quotes Barthes, Cixous, Lacan, Lispector, and many others. Much later, in Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance, 2022, a mountain’s soliloquy is broken by quotation-like technical drawings of tectonic plates. In Notes on a novel (that I am not going to write), 2017, the artist publishes a digital environment that mixes a travel diary, annotations from different sources, candid photos, hand-drawn maps, and texts written by other invited artists. Can autotheory’s “I” be ecstatic, de-centered from individual embodied subjectivity towards the choral multitude of a landscape? Can an “auto-” be an “allo-” without losing itself? This presentation proposes traversing autotheory’s by-now familiar territory (the meta structures, the intertextual/intermedia games, the performative referencing), to arrive somewhere else.