ARCHIVE_RAPE
Excerpt Only
TW: Themes of sexual violence.
Excerpt from Archive-Rape for Writing the Archive
The Writing Squad, Special PUSH Issue
May 2022
‘[…] Whilst this work is a huge, unapologetic, solemn ‘Fuck You’ to the British Museum, it’s also a set of confessions and insights into a world and a community that long predates all of its colonisers, which still continues to flourish and be.’
Corrosion-poems interspersed with plagiarised fragments from the British Museum’s digital catalogue archive on the Kabyle Azrar (Necklace), Item no. Af1974,06.1. Archive-Rape plagiarises fragments from the British Museum’s records on this Azrar, appearing indistinguishable from the poetry, which has been partially ‘digitally smeared’. The poetry itself is voiced by the Azrar, which has experienced all manner of rituals in and out of the museum, from mealtimes to photoshoots, first menses to conservation cleans, from sex to sexual violence. In its forced removal from its origins, this Azrar sustains its continual violation, divided from its Kabyle woman, and from the North African elements from which it was made.
Writing the Archive, an initiative led by Fahad Al-Amoudi, Prerana Kumar and myself from the Writing Squad, develops a poetics from the archive as a creative source, as well as unifying artists with their heritages.
Read more here.
Excerpt from The Trouble with Being Fucked
COPY: A Magazine of Recycled Materials, Wasted Books
San Francisco, USA (2022)
An entirely plagiarised cut-up piece about the trouble with being fucked. Manipulated from the following: Susan Sontag's As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964—1980; Cunt-Ups from Dodie Bellamy; E M Cioran's The Trouble With Being Born; W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn; Charles Dickens Bleak House; Perfume from Patrick Süskind; Georges Bataille Story of the Eye; The Cow from Ariana Reines; Édouard Levé's Suicide;
Attention Seeking by Adam Phillips; ‘Bob’s Boy’ by Lisa Beskin; ‘Pure Girls’ by Camille Roy; ‘1970’ by Adele Bertei; ‘Bitter and Jealous’ by Dominique Dibbell and 'Cancer Winter' by Marilyn Hacker, which all feature in the book The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz. The title of the work takes itself from E. M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born and a line from Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups.
You “can’t buy it” here.
Excerpt from These Mutilated Angels
TOLKA, Issue Two
Dublin, Ireland
November 2021
I medidate on Burial, ‘Ashtray Wasp’ KINDRED EP (2012), LSD and Cornwall.
Purchase a copy of the fab issue here.
‘Tintagel History As a Series of Omissions’ explores how history often erases connections to other places. Researching Tintagel Castle revealed connections to North Africa, and vital import links outsourcing olive oil, dates and spices. How can these sites be called English when their enrichment, survival and nourishment depended on elsewhere?
Full anthology accessible from here.
Please note this graphic was created separately to
the work featured in the anthology.
(JULY 2019) N.B. : Pierre Molinier’s Sur le pavois, planche 26 du Chaman (1968-70), was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery for the ‘Kiss My Genders’ group exhibition show in Southbank, London. This piece of writing is a caption to this specific photograph of Molinier’s work. It was developed as part of a writing exercise encouraged by the Writing course at Royal College of Art to determine how to write “captions” and what exactly they are, or how they function when considering the audience’s understanding of a piece of work. This specific piece is an outcome from the ways in which I interpret captions written for artwork, and how captions may not necessarily be information in the traditional sense, but rather writing which can ultimately shape and convey multiple interpretations of a piece of work, and defy categorising that work in the same context.
Sur le pavois, planche 26 du Chaman
Pierre Molinier (1968-70)
Hayward Gallery, Southbank, London
An Academic Perversion (2018): (Excerpt: Annihilation)
Aftermath (2019)
Nothing to Say (2019)
EXPRESS YOURSELF (2018)
Love Poem #1 (2018)
