A room in one's own: performing inner spaces, autotheoretical and beyond

Abstract

In the 1929 essay “A room of one’s own”, Virginia Woolf famously states that a woman should have “money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” But what would it mean to write herself as a room, and a true-to-life one at that? There is a historically well-established correlation between interior and interiority. From Saint Teresa of Ávila’s “inner castle” (a 16th century self-portrait as mystical architecture), to Louise Bourgeois’ returning femme maisons (from the 1940s to the 1990s) - dwelling and being are intimately intertwined. The self-place duality meets then another one: space and image. Charles Rice claims that the interior as we currently understand it is a 19th century fabrication that conceptualises this doubling. How do we imagine this twinned perception of the interior in the 21st century, with the new imaging techniques? If one’s interior and interiority overlap, how do we not only write but visualise these discursive, architectural forms of being? If Walter Benjamin thought interiors could be read like detective novels, could the traces of the quotidian be intentionally employed as written clues of one’s life? This talk is a revision of an abandoned project, a digital twin (talk about doubles!) of my own domestic space that prompted the virtual visitor to read autotheoretical fragments stored in it. Autotheory, a performative writing genre that sustains that the personal is theoretical, felt like a particularly relevant approach to the project: a private space, peppered with intimate writing, opened for dissection, used as a sort of citation. With this talk I hope to kick-start a conversation about intimacy, performative writing, spatiality, and the self.