The Feminine Sublime

Text written after the performance in June, 2019 in Athens

The nude in words, what is more revealing than saying exactly what comes to mind, and even more so by writing it down for everyone to see? Thoughts that are stupid, ill-conceived and unsettling are all part of who we are. We are all idiots. Why are we always trying to be profane and superior - why isn´t the mud the place to be? If we would all just share more bad ideas and dumb questions we would be more relaxed.

We faced some problems while organising the mass of six hundred speech bubbles. How do we want to organise them into a book? Do we select our favourite bubbles and highlight them? Will we construct them into themes to keep some sort of a narrative or simply embrace the chaotic where there is no structure whatsoever?

After some negotiation we found it most important to stay true to the performance as it was in that action where these somewhat 600 written speech bubbles originate from. The speech bubble has a thought bubble inside of it, why? Because we wanted to merge both. It's a discourse that searches for an alternative view on a dialogue, a thought process that can perhaps bolster us by pointing towards our commonality, our faults, but at the same time deflate us just by doing so. This is why we felt we needed to include every written speech bubble - as if each one were a link in a chain. The silliness in one sentence might in turn evoke a witty or a poetic response in another.

 The fruit of our labour has been published as a book. A book that in no small way has been  inspired by as well as sharing a title with Barbara C. Freeman´s work, The Feminine Sublime, where she argues that the dominant concept of the sublime is patriarchally defined. She maintains that there is an alternative sublime, a feminine sublime that is completely open and offers the means to analyze the sublime in new and incisive ways. In her book Freeman writes the following:  

The feminine sublime is neither a rhetorical mode nor an aesthetic category, but a domain of experience that resists categoriszation, in which the subject enters into relation with an otherness—social, aesthetic, political, ethical, erotic—that is excessive and unrepresentable.[2] (The Feminine Sublime, 1997, Barbara C. Freeman)

So here is a book that facilitates this slightly chaotic archive where the meaningful and meaningless enjoy equal status. Additionally, four women from various fields of the arts, Christina Petkopoulou, Eva Rún Snorradóttir, Myrto Katsimicha and Scarlett Platel, have contributed individual texts that all explore the manifolded subject of the feminine sublime.