A Diary on Slowness at Örö Fortress Island
(2021)
author(s): Francisco Beltrame Trento
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition emerges from the field notes diary of the researcher during their stay in the Ores residency program at Örö Fortress Island. Örö, previously a military fortress, dates from the Russian Empire era and it was closed to visitation until 2015. The piece focuses on the temporalities enacted outside the city, in connection with more-than-human materialities, and, in contrast, discusses the neurotypical constraints of academic spaces. I criticise the (lack of) approach to neurodiversity in educational settings, and the temporalities implied in the required tasks in such settings, even when the subject is physically distant from the academic space. There is a growing interest in Slow scholarship (Ulmer, 2017; 2018). At Örö, I proposed experiments in video, photography and writing, by thinking with slowness in ontological terms. In this diary, slowness is approached conceptually and anecdotally, in a humorous autoethnographic fashion. The residence period coincided with the initial quarantine to neutralise the coronavirus pandemic, which resonated with the text, always existing in between a personal narrative and a conceptual discussion. The exposition features a photographic essay and several video clips.
i'm vrey into you
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Francisco Beltrame Trento, Anouk Mirte Hoogendoorn
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
During the Montréal summer of 2018, two creatures met in Canada. One creature came back to Amsterdam, and we decided we needed to continue the conversation through a series of exchanged texts. We created a file on Google Docs, in which we could add our thoughts, not separating where the writing of one ends and where one begins. Sometimes we do not know where one's body starts and ends. This (an)archive exponentially grew and reached more than 100 pages. The collective writing was the development of techniques for living together even apart, and more than, to survive the neurotypical world. We decided to call it I'm vrey into you. It resonates with a book of exchanged missives between the media theorist McKenzie Wark and poet Kathy Acker in the mid-nineties, published as "I'm very into you".
During that summer we watched the last season of the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-1991; 2017), in which one of the main characters' manufactured doppelgangers travelled to this world but kept some tendencies of his past iteration from the black lodge (speaking words back to front - we understood he saying vrey instead of yrev, that would be very in this world). This is a multimodal work that mixes text, images and videos, resonating with the contingency and non-fixidity of being neuroqueer, as Melanie Yergeau states.
i'm vrey into you has several iterations. A tiny modified excerpt was published in Simulacrum Magazine (The University of Amsterdam). Another version, that has differences in its form and content, is going to be published at Inflexions Journal (Senselab, Canada).