Traces: ‘Free-assemblage making’
as a method to touch self-narrative
The research by practice combines psychology and psychoanalysis, invoking the framework of self-continuity and the concept of self-narrative.
A written and visual, sculptural practice of 'free-assemblage making,' explores the materiality of traces as elements that speak of the fragmentation and discontinuity of cultural and environmental displacement and dislocation.
Key writers and makers drawn upon include Sedikides with self-continuity, Steyerl with materiality, Lic Rodrigo B with Lacon's theory, Tracey Emin with feminist installations and Hew Locke with found objects sculptures.
The research explores how might we use 'free-assemblage making' to represent as well as analyse psychoanalytically, poetically and visually the ideas of self- continuity and self narrative, and the paradoxes they hold.
https://freight.cargo.site/m/L1908758508347002788638527584069/.pdf
Free-assemblage-making allows artists to decompose and reconstruct original objects subconsciously in any dimension, free from the structures and considerations of art practice that already have. After the process of choosing, placing, and making, it goes to use autobiographical reasoning afterward to analyze the choices they made in the process. By matching previous emotions or stories with the outcomes from the making process, the structure of the self-narrative will be touched, and old memories held in objects raised.
Be touched
working with objects from my past, free assemblage making in physical world, and touching self-narrative with making and writing
“I'm sitting in my house at a table by the window. Despite the large window, most of the time, day or night, the sun does not shine into my room. As I sit here alone, I am surrounded by warm yellow light, enveloped in it, and my vision is warm, even though my body doesn't feel the warmth..
There was no sound in all directions and I could hear myself breathing. My breath connected with them. Then I felt them with me, quickly forming a larger net that connected me to others and, by extension, to everyone in the world. I didn't know them, I'd never met them.…I sit alone in the house, and I am not alone…”
'I am attempting some kind of rescue operation, trying to restore things to their former integrity and former status, to bring myself back to the space of the past. In that space, I don't hear the ghastly noises of my family, and I don't have to deal with all the disturbing emotions I've encountered out there and in men. I digested and healed on my own, and I was safe with myself.
Those needs of yesteryear: unconditional love, the desire for sex and ultimately the intimate space they constitute, condense in this one object. Those confusions that I didn't understand in my youth become clear in the present day. At the beginning of my adolescence, when the self-narrative was budding, the process of objectification of the female self manifested itself in one decorative kitschy trinket. My stuffed animals that were my only companions during my restless and chaotic adolescence, silently providing unconditional listening, also appear in this one package.'
'Here, I finally understood, I finally saw.
In the vast gaps of my self-narrative were my constant attempts to distance myself from my environment, my attempts to desire the impotence of being desired. It was the restlessness I kept feeling in my mind at work, my need to be safe, safer. I needed stable connection, more stable connection. In a large void, all the attempts I made driven by this force created a disconnect with my overall emotions, which leads to a very sad speculation:
Maybe all the attempts I've made in the past have been useless.'
Be filled
working with urban traces and asemic writing, free assemblage making in graphical world, observing dating life to see whether the gap in self-narrative been filled
“Let me build you up, they said, I love you like crazy.
A crowd of strangers rushed to my side and lifted me high in the air. We will die, they said, and together we will forge a golden bronze statue that exists only for you. They leapt up in a frenzy, one on top of the other, gradually turning into a small mountain. Some cut off their own arms and stuck their bloodied arms into the mountain; others gouged out their eyes and filled the gaps in the mountain.
Slowly the hill took the shape of a snowman, and it swayed as if it would collapse at any moment.
I lay down on it and looked at the sky, which had never felt so blue.
Little by little, I melted into the hill. They became my blood. The new blood gave me strength and I ran to the top of the hill and turned into ashes under the sun.”
'I think of grasping, I always want to grasp. I always default to others in my favour and surround me only, I am the subject, they are the object. They become the substrate that fulfils my fragile dreams. Then the illusions break, one after the other, and the dreams gradually collapse, and I see behind the tattered curtains, remnants of a world in motion. In my dream world they are static, they are symbols, shapes, geometries of perception.
I use the language they give me to explain me, to explain my world.
When I don't need these symbols very much for construction, when the symbols I already have are enough to hold up the dream. At that point, new symbols will no longer intervene and the dream will be stable forever.'
'I’m in a in-between world, formed from the weird graphics and my words.
I’m walking in the city, but can’t see.
Where am I going, and what for.
I’m listening to the sound, from my tent, from my space, from my mind.
I’m in the tent, I’m with the tent, I am the tent.
Please be curious of what I am,
I don’t know what I am,
You say what I am.
Who are you?
It doesn’t matter anymore, I can’t see you anyways.'
Be broken
working with digital elements, textile and sound, free assemblage making in digital world, situation of the paradox that self-narrative held showing
'Stairway corridor is often a transitional space, a space that does not stay too long.
It makes it seem as if one is in a perpetual state of waiting, not knowing when there will be a turnaround and the end is uncertain.
It is like the childhood process of being lost or left behind in an unfamiliar environment waiting for one's parents to come back, when the strangers in one's eyes do not offer any help.
It triggers some adults' deep-seated empathy with the lack of love and care in their childhood, and their sense of dislocation towards the environment through the surreal way of creation.
This kind of empathy is no longer possible to reproduce in reality, but will bring a sense of peace of mind like reading a book inside a house on a rainy day.'