Reflection in Digestion 2012

Performed at Book Live! international symposium and related live performances  at London South Bank University on 9th June 2012, organised by the Centre for Media and Cultural Research (CMCR) at London South Bank University and bookRoom Research Cluster at University for the Creative Arts Farnham & Wimbledon College of Art Library, 5, 6, 9 & 10 July 2012.

Paper, pens, pebbles, desk, chair, footrest and lecture and lever arch file and contents. Live performance: 10 hours, 30 minutes & 30 hourss.

Photography: Jolyon Gardner & Mindy Lee

The book Reflection on Digestion does not yet exist. Before the pages can be inscribed and collated, the sections sewn, book block bound, the text must be generated. A durational performance, Reflection in Digestion, at Book Live! originates this manuscript through the performative act of copying and re-writing of texts made on a Post-Graduate Certificate in Teaching, reflections on research as practice, and personal and phenomenological narrative.

Reading, in medieval times, argued by Carruthers in The Book and the Body,  was ‘a bodily performance’, rather than simply the decoding of words on a page. Similarly, Reflection in Digestion reconnects the body (of both writer and viewer) with writing through the action of the scribe, reading, consideration, translation, and the act of copying reconstituting a relationship arguably severed by the invention of the printing press.

Reflection in Digestion, lasting for 10 hours, documents the process of performance, of thinking and writing, of copying and remembering whilst simultaneously recording the body’s shifting emotional and physical states through the loops and garlands of the handwriting itself.