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I was doing a digital clear-out of my documents recently, and I found one titled 'Things I'd like to do to my Body'. I only vaguely remembered writing it, and took a quick look. I can't find it again now, it seems to have disappeared. The only entry that I can remember said:

'I heard there's a bone that goes through your brain. I'd like to snap that.'

 
For Notes to Other Selves, Leah Clements, Susanna Davies-Crook, Alice Hattrick and Sophie Hoyle have created a multi-authored text on Google Docs built from an accumulation of notes to self and footnotes on notes. Growing over several months in the time of COVID-19 and from conversations that took place on Zoom in late Summer, Autumn and Winter 2020, the document acts as a shared record and prismatic refraction of embodiment, sickness, diagnosis, crip-time, grief and queerness. Taking up the theme of care, the group have created a support structure, of which the text is a byproduct.

The full text can be read here, and listened to here. Perhaps have both open at the same time.

Though having been cultivated over many months, the sound recording is of the first time the text was read out loud. In the Google Doc, there is a slippage of authorship as the multiple voices unify to become one, then as the text is spoken, each writer explores their own words.

Expanding from the text, the group discuss in their final Zoom call of this project what it means to put bodily experiences into words. This performance and discussion is a physical enactment that ‘gives voice’ to the Google Doc and resonance to the language therein. Through saying and performing the words aloud, the group expects new responses to form, adding further addendums or verbal footnotes to what they have already written.

Automatic subtitles will be available by clicking the YouTube auto-caption icon in the lower right hand screen.

There is a PDF of the transcription available to download here.

Apologies that we have been unable to include a BSL interpretation for this event.

This event has been organised by Joanna Harrison with Susanna Davies-Crook for the #almanaccare programme.

 
Leah Clements is an artist based in London whose practice spans film, performance, writing, installation, and other media. Her work is concerned with the relationship between the psychological, emotional, and physical, often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her practice also focuses on sickness/cripness/disability in art, in critical and practical ways.

leahclements.com / @leah_r_clements / Access Docs for Artists

Susanna Davies-Crook is a writer, artist and curator based in London. Her practice locates at the point between words, speech and interpretation. She is interested in the somatic and spoken language of nervous systems, breath, consciousness, perception and embodiment. Professionally she has held editorial positions at magazines including DAZED and Sleek, and published widely in art magazines including Frieze, Harper’s Bazaar and LEAP. Most recently she worked with Jefferson Hack on Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder at 180 Strand as Associate Curator. She is currently writing her first novel.

Alice Hattrick is a writer and producer based in London. Their non-fiction book on chronic illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, titled ILL FEELINGS, will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in August 2021. Alice’s work has most recently been included in HEALTH: Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel/MIT, 2020) and Mine Searching Yours (Forma, 2020). They teach criticism at the London College of Fashion.

Sophie Hoyle is an artist and writer whose practice relates personal experiences of being queer, disabled, non-binary and part of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) diaspora to wider forms of structural violence. Their work draws on intersectionality or how alliances can be formed where different kinds of inequality and marginalisation intersect, and from lived experience of psychiatric conditions and chronic illness, they began to explore the history and (mis)uses of biomedical technologies.

www.sophiehoyle.com

Alice and Leah, with artist Lizzy Rose, launched Access Docs for Artists in 2019: an online resource to help disabled art workers outline and share their access needs.

 
The project is supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts.