The touch of words : obscure spatial encounters

Abstract

This article addresses the touch of words on corporeality in reading, performing, and writing in an artistic research project. Here, touch refers to forms of listening, perceiving, moving, and writing triggered by Finnish people’s written memories and experiences concerning mental hospitals. The article, which forms part of the outcome of a multidisciplinary research project titled Engraved in the body, is based on the effects on the researcher of reading these written accounts. Through their inexplicable touch, their obscurity, these memories have haunted, fascinated, and driven the artist-researcher to perform and write in a way which, while not ‘knowing’ anything, nevertheless acknowledges the unpredictable affective touch of memories. This has led the writer and performer to experience infinite spatialities in which conscious acts are replaced by the resonance of memories, generating in turn a kind of non-personal corporeality for transmitting something in them that is hidden or inexpressible through traces of their touch on corporeality. Throughout the process of reading these memories, the continuous practice of a somatic movement technique, the Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), with its poetic vocabulary and notion of the spatiality of corporeality enabled exposure and attunement to the quality of the written memories of others and to the silence beyond them. Alongside SRT, this article draws specifically on the insights of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy to articulate the lived relation between corporeality, language, and writing.