In Wake of Melting: mapping the auditory liminal realm between desire and death

Abstract

In Wake of Melting: mapping the auditory liminal realm between desire and death is a presentation given at the London Conference on Critical Thought 2024. For this, I unfolded, as it were, the footnotes of the COLLATERAL publication into a reflective text.

The movement of melting is an ideal metaphor for the liminal experience. Something that is in the process of melting is perpetually in transformation and is characterized by a continual change from solid to liquid, being neither one nor the other.

With my lecture performance, I want to map out the zone between Anne Carson’s meditations on desire as the “melter of limbs”, and Patricia de Martelaere’s reflections on embracing the flow of life and death that make us aware of the universal human struggle with letting go. How does the human desire, or precisely the fear, to dissolve, to become one with its environment or another being in life and death, drive us towards change, shapeshifting and leaving known paths and subdivisions?

The interdisciplinary approach adds a degree of liminality to my artistic practice where I constantly find myself at the landwash between the auditory and visual, the abstraction of words and the physicality of the voice. To map out this littoral ‘territory of melting’ between desire and death, I want to observe how the waves of these different worlds lap and break the shore and look for what remains of them at low tide. What new insights do we gain about these deeply human experiences by exploring the borderland between various forms of creating?

Doing so, I want to reveal how artistic practices can lead to being physically immersed in liminal states that are not exceptional but deeply rooted in daily life. The lecture will be accompanied by a soundscape and make connections between music, visual art, fiction, and philosophy.