THE COMPULSION TO REPEAT
The pictures are back from the fifth and final MAY BE ON THE MOORS walk, The Compulsion to Repeat.
The walk began with a reference to Mark Fisher’s idea that hauntology is in one sense driven by what Freudian psychoanalysis had termed as ‘a compulsion to repeat’. Here, we engaged with the ideas of hauntological or uncanny repetition driven not by destructive or inescapable loops, but rather by agential loops (or what Karen Barad describes as Agential Cuts) and by that idea that you can never step in the same river twice. The river is different and so are we.
We made lumen prints with the two cairns between Peel Tower and Pilgrim’s Cross as we did on the first walk back at the start of May. As expected, the results were quite different. The behaviour of people and photographic paper was also quite different.
After the lumen printing, we found a sheltered spot from the wind to roll out a 10 meter roll of lining paper, with which we made drawings from memory. With inspiration from indigenous storytelling practices such as songlines, we drew moments, fragments, and episodes of our memory of both this walk and previous MAY BE ON THE MOORS walks with compressed charcoal together on one sheet of paper.
All of the work made during MAY BE ON THE MOORS will be available to view and interact with at our upcoming exhibition Altogether Otherwise. Join us on the first weekend of July to see more.
Friday 3rd July, 5-8pm
Saturday 4th July, 10-4
Sunday 5th July, 10-4
Is there there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds up? Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology.
Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 10.