About

Any presence – even though it is ignored – of a particular culture, even a silent one, is an active relay in Relation – Édouard Glissant

‘writing in relation’ is a space for thinking and writing with art. It was initiated by Yvette Greslé  as a way of exploring art across media and across historical, geographical, social and political conditions.

I am primarily interested in questions that have to do with history and memory and am especially engaged by art’s relationship to social, political  and autobiographical narratives. I foreground art as a site through which to think about its potentially ethical, transformative, affective, poetic and relational capacities while holding in place the actualities and after-lives of historical violence and the encounters these continue to produce and reinscribe. Art is not conceived of as an object from which the writer or historian is detached. Rather, it produces languages, visual, sonic, spatial, temporal, affective, and performative that have the capacity to affect, and in doing so, to inform and expand writing, critical and ethical thinking. I think a great deal about how it is I can learn from and relate to others outside of myself and my own immediate experience of the world.

I conceive of ‘writing in relation’ as a space for documenting published and unpublished art writing and scholarly work in progress.

Reference: Édouard Glissant, [Transl. Wing, Betsy]. Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), originally published in French in 1990, p.177.

yvegresle (at) gmail dot com