In the tail end of 2013, Luke Bennett and Katja Hock released their collaborative effort Scree, currently available for download from Bennett's blog. Launching from an enquiry into an ordinary house brick sheltered in his garage, the pursuit to take it "back to the place of its birth" carry Bennett to peculiar wasteland places layered together in an accumulating escarpment: landfill, abandoned skiers' dry slope, forgotten gas works, ghost town and more.
"When I started out on this project I thought I'd be writing about the absence of the excavated matter, but the more I have searched for and peered into these 'holes' the more I have realised that what has happened here is the moving around of matter - across local space, across form and through time. Nothing has disappeared, it has just changed state or location."
Written in a self-identified psychogeographic style, Bennet and Hock's piece reads like a memoir replete with haunting images of space and memory. It includes, in the last handful of pages, a back-and-forth Q&A-style dialogue between Bennett and Hock ruminating on their different styles of approach to the project. The "'coffee-table' art book" can be downloaded as a pdf from here.
In the shadows of the corporeal and the various articulations of the body is the possibility of its haunting, its spectrality and bodily imperceptibility. In 2012, University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin are jointly organising a postgraduate conference which addresses these themes within the ambit of philosophy and literature.
Held at the Institute for Integration Studies at the Trinity, the conference organisers have just released their call for all papers spectral in theme, including (but not limited to):
"1. The Gothic
2. Twentieth century philosophical approaches to the concept of spectrality
3. The spectres of cultural memory and identity in peripheral literatures"
The call for papers closes on 14 November 2011. While this is an open postgraduate conference, some preference may be given to students enrolled at UCD and TCD depending on the quantity of applicants.
