"As artists, we often feel this pressure to be very consistent in our style, our approach, what we represent, but the artists that I most respect keep a certain provisionality"
Sophie Seita speaks about working across multiple artistic forms, the ethical imperative of queer, feminist practice, and the provisional approach which undergirds her work across visual art, text and performance, as found in her book Lessons of Decal (The87Press, 2023).
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Kashif Sharma-Patel: It would be worth outlining, Sophie, your practice of writing as showcased in Lessons of Decal. Your writing covers multiple forms – from manifesto to performance lecture, live essay, video piece scripts and translation essays – and this intersection of forms is undergirded by a polyvocality rooted in critical reading. You seem to advocate for bringing in other voices into your work.
Sophie Seita: I started writing the pieces in Lessons of Decal in 2017/2018 when I was doing a post-doc and transforming my PhD into a monograph. At the time, I felt very strongly that having just jumped through all these different academic hoops, that it was now time to play and have fun and actually reclaim the sense of pleasure that originally brought me to reading and that I felt had got a little lost along the way. It was also a time when I was working a lot on various multimedia performance pieces either on my own or in collaboration with other artists and musicians. I was thinking expansively about what could happen in a live situation, what can happen with text, how it can be transformed into a performance, into sound, into video, into a performative object, into a set, into projection, all of these things, beyond the page. I wanted to make reading feel alive and embodied and visual. And then I felt that I ought to bring some of that vivaciousness, that multifaceted experimentation with materials and forms into my writing for the page, too. I also no longer wanted to separate these identities that I’d somehow put into boxes: Sophie the academic, Sophie the artist, Sophie the writer, Sophie the performer, Sophie the teacher, but also Sophie. I didn't want to keep them separate as I felt they were actually mutually informing. Also, as I say in the book, I needed to work something out, like Suzanne Cusick: ‘I needed to work it out. I needed to understand what relationship, if any, I could suppose to exist between my being a lesbian and my being a musician, a musicologist.’ Lessons of Decal, as a project, emerged out of my desire to bring different forms and identities together.
That is partly where the polyvocality comes from. In academic writing you are always referring to other critics and other texts either in a form of reverence or a form of critique in that you have to praise or topple what someone has said before you and establish this hierarchy and kind of know your place. I didn't like either of these responses, I felt they had shortcomings. Sometimes you don’t know your place and you might want to lose it, and your feelings and attitudes might shift over time. I wanted to engage more experimentally with voices that have come before me, both in my critical writing and in my creative practice. Sometimes artists pretend that they have emerged out of nowhere, and that they are not part of this larger ecosystem of thinking and making. I find this ecosystem actually super important as we are constantly digesting other people’s ideas and other people are constantly digesting our ideas, because that is what constitutes dialogue. And sometimes influence or inspiration can be even more elusive (or effusive!) in that images, words, ideas just swirl around us and it is not clear exactly where they come from: maybe it is a sound or a smell or a pattern. I wanted to acknowledge that in my creative and critical practice. And finally, for me this acknowledgement of other voices, is also a queer, feminist, and even ethical imperative.
KSP: And what led you to producing so many different forms of writing exactly?
SS: I didn’t want to keep my creative practice separate from my research and teaching. I was thinking a lot about what artistic research is as opposed to traditional research that follows linear arguments and structures, and instead wanted to lean into associative thinking and intuition. That drew me towards the lecture-performance; because I see it as a unique opportunity to play with knowledge, costume knowledge, wear knowledge. A lot of my performances involve garments I have made which may incorporate texts or drawings. A lecture-performance is a kind of live thinking into a room which is very different from a traditional academic lecture or a conference paper which often makes people fall asleep! (Then again, I’m all for generative distraction and boredom, ‘evenly suspended attention’ as Freud called it.)
A lot of the materials in the book are interested in forms of relationality, in series, imprecise or imperfect copying, repetition, things that leave an imprint on you. I ask myself: what happens when I re-use something and put it in another context? What happens when I repeat something? Does it stay the same? Does it have a different effect? What happens when I create a series? I think that comes from my background in music, thinking about seriality and abstraction as giving you space and time to think and feel something.
The many forms you mentioned earlier also happened because whatever question or curiosity emerged for each piece, a different form was called for. It couldn’t be the same form. For example, there’s a piece that’s about love poems and loving forms of address, which uses the letter form and also addresses the poet I’m writing about as if I was writing to them; another essay has a visually fragmented and rhythmic format because it’s about polyphony; there are also two lecture performances which have performance notes, stage directions, or descriptions of the slides that are playing in the background in the live version.
KSP: How does this relate to a queer-feminist practice? How would you define that in the first place? Secondarily, perhaps we can also think about the canon: are you disrupting the canon, or creating a new one?
SS: Probably disrupting the canon. It is hard to know if I am contributing to a new canon, as that’s for the future to retrospectively ascribe. It is always quite interesting, when you are involved in a practice, to wonder how you are shaping things for the future. In a way that comes back to my question of an ethical imperative. You are modelling something that you hope people will pick up and work with, or also work against. I am hoping the work has an openness to it and an invitation to do something with it. I hope it’s not closed off.
As someone who has been brought up with the canon but also many counter-canons, I’m more interested in figuring out what affects our moods or atmospheres beyond rejection, paranoia, or admiration and idolisation. What other forms can we engage with when we engage with these canonical voices and materials?
Especially in the context of an intersectional feminist rethinking of the canon, there are obviously lots of people we now consider to be very dubious. Does that mean we want to throw them out of the canon (become gatekeepers ourselves), or can we still do something with them? Can we still learn something from them? How do we grapple with the morally or politically problematic figures and materials? That is actually a larger political question anyway. We can think about questions of taste and complicity, and how tastes are shaped. And maybe it’s less about an in/out mentality or policy and more about how we want to spend our time, what nourishes us creatively.
In terms of queer-feminist practice, it’s absolutely about engaging with voices that have come before us and understanding how we are enmeshed with them.
Queer theory and practice also teaches me that it shouldn’t lead to a calcification of what identity is or what its expressions are. It is a more open-ended and non-linear approach to not-knowing, to being in relation with other people, to thinking about bodies and desire. That could be our imperative for learning, for reading, for making art. It is also about recognising how these things do not fit necessarily with normative categories or standards.
Feminist voices teach me this constant renegotiation of what solidarity and allyship means, which also isn’t fixed. It’s about listening to many, often contradictory voices, at the same time, which links to my interest in polyvocality, allowing these other voices to just be present rather than simplifying them, streamlining them.
KSP: It makes me think of the politics of citation, but you are not just citing people, but actually bringing them into the work directly.
SS: I do see it as an act of generosity. I take the people I cite seriously as interlocutors, rather than using citations as an exercise of doing my due diligence, or putting something to bed. What happens if I bring this person in as if they were in the room with me, using their words or even deforming their words in a way that is quite a truthful representation of listening to other people. We never truly know what someone means and we are always shaping other people’s words to suit our own means (not maliciously just in the sense of everyday misunderstandings and distractions and ambivalences and ambiguities). In a way bringing other voices into the work is a more open and truthful acknowledgement of the playfulness and responsiveness we have in other interactions.
KSP: I wanted to ask you about provisionality, and thinking about the provisionality of knowledge. You tie that explicitly to writing itself, where the writing itself is the production of thinking about what knowledge could be. That is clearly rooted in poetics, in the manner in which it is reflective and transformatory. I wonder how that works with your writing, but also your pedagogical role.
SS: This term, provisionality, has been with me since I was working on my PhD, which focussed on the contributions of little magazines to the canon, but also their subversive strategies against the canon. I had set out wanting to write a PhD which was basically a new theory of the avant-garde. I thought the way to do it was to rescue a certain idea of what I thought the avant-garde was at the time. But then I encountered all these small publications where avant-garde writers and artists had published, and I had to throw all my rather rigid ideas overboard. They didn't propose this monolithic idea of what the avant-garde was. Even within one magazine or collected anthology there was so much disagreement, so much inconsistency, and so many visions and practices shifting all the time. I felt the best and most historically realistic and intellectually honest thing (but also most interesting thing) I could do was propose a provisional theory and really embrace that provisionality. And to get rid of the idea that a theory of the avant-garde needs to assign certain characteristics and attribute certain dates and key figures. This didn’t represent the delightfully chaotic, polymorphic, dissident structures of these groups and publications. They were very heterogeneous. Provisionality has really been a guiding light for me in thinking about community and practice ever since.
As artists, we often feel this pressure to be very consistent in our style, our approach, what we represent, but the artists that I most respect keep a certain provisionality and let the process guide them somehow. And I respect that. The work will tell you what it needs.
In terms of pedagogy, after studying all these incredibly rich and exciting materials for such a long time I felt uncomfortable imposing a particular canon or authoritative analysis to my students. That felt wrong to me given that I had just spent years trying to untangle that whole notion of authority and hierarchy and monolithic readings. I continue to incorporate that sort of provisionality into my teaching. When I’m in a tutorial or crit or a lecture or seminar, I always try to offer a provisional interpretation. Interpretation is something we do together, in the room and things can and should shift.
KSP: Any further reflections on the book as it has percolated? Any interesting feedback?
SS: Some parts of the book, particularly when I perform live, can be difficult for an audience to engage with, either because there’s a lot going on or there are all these references or unusual turns of phrase or meanderings of thought. But I’ve received a lot of feedback from people that they understand the work’s opacity as something quite musical, so while they’re not directly or immediately getting everything in the sense that they could immediately translate it into straightforward prose, they’re understanding it on a sensory or subconscious level. It’s like you’re following the rhythms of my thought, understanding that I am using language as a material, and you move alongside me without the expectation to get everything. Someone compared the book to Derek Jarman's Blue which was really the best compliment!
I think the texts take you on a journey, particularly in a live context, and that compels people to let go of their desire to hold onto or immediately grasp the meaning of it.
KSP: For sure, like resisting that empiricist drive and embracing an aesthetics of difficulty.
SS: Totally, and although I have moved away from poetry per se, I still have that commitment to a certain type of avant-garde (late) modernist poetics. Perhaps we are more used to that in certain poetry settings, but what happens if you introduce that into an essay or into a lecture or into a video piece.
KSP: It is interesting that in an art context that question of difficulty is often better received than in a traditional literary world. There is a greater willingness and openness I have found.
SS: I think that’s why I have found myself working in an art school, and my practice has shifted into visual art. I still have all these connections with writing, of course, which is an integral part of my practice, but I find it really interesting to position writing within an art context. There is an openness to the forms it could take. It isn’t beholden to genre. This is why I found it so liberating. It was a better fit for me.
KSP: What are you working on at the moment?
SS: I have a residency in Berlin at the moment, working on experimental graphic scores, drawings, and textiles. I have been interested in scores for a long time, especially scores that suggest sonic performance or movement, in a non-linear way. I recently had an exhibition up in Darlington, supported by Creative Darlington. And as part of this project in the Tees Valley, I have been doing workshops with queer young people and am doing a performance for Middlesbrough Art Week. For the exhibition, I made seven screen-printed and embroidered textile pieces which depicted graphic scores for imaginary queer bodies and voices. I have also produced a creative audio description for these textile pieces. It’s obviously about access but it has also become a performative and poetic piece in its own right. It has become a sound piece that plays a lot with this question of interpretation when looking at abstract shapes. The next stage of the project will be to apply for funding to do live performances and work with other performers to interpret the scores sonically and choreographically.
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Sophie Seita is a London-based artist and researcher whose practice is grounded in language and performance but swerves voraciously into other mediums, such as sound, video, textiles, drawing, and installation. Sophie teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, currently holds the 2023-2024 Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and is the co-founder of the revived Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions. Lessons of Decal (2023), a collection of art writing, was recently published by the 87Press.
