Samira Alirezabeigi
Stories to be written…

In this text, Samira Alirezabeigi casts a curatorial gaze on the graduation show and investigates how writing comes into being in the work of this year’s fellow final-year students.

As a researcher who scrutinizes the materialities of writing and its technological transformations, she argues that writing as an artistic practice emerges not so much as a means of communication or merely as a mode of reflection. Rather, the materiality and embodiment, rhythmicity and memory, become an integral part of writing as an artistic practice - all of which opens up a different ontological space for writing.

The act of writing, its materiality and embodied significance, its technological development over the centuries and the meanings it carries both as a medium and topic for artistic practice might not be so prominent in the art world. However, it is a highly important one. At this particular moment when writing is increasingly reduced to a sheer act of communication and instruction which can be delegated to Gen AI and chatbots, what remains of writing raises urgent questions to reflect upon and play with.

During the graduation show, I was bewildered to find valuable works that engage with writing both as a medium and as a theme. Three works specifically were highlighted and I had a chat with Hana Hassanzadeh Kiani (graphic design), Ulysse Potet (photography) and Arthur De Boever (educational master) to dive deeper into their practice. What the works of these art graduates have in common is that writing is not so much a matter of literary endeavor or what we most commonly associate with writing, as ‘creative writing’. In all the works, it is the writing itself, its labor, its worldmaking potential and its materiality that are explored at the center. Writing appears as a rhythmic ritual that needs to be repeated, is an intimate form of attention formation, and it engages with generational and embodied memories.

A moving hand inscribes words on the paper, pinning down the dancing shape of ‘فراموش کردن’ (Persian verb: to forget) on a notebook. Words appear and disappear as subtitles on the video, as the hand keeps repeating and mimicking, a gesture that shows what it is like to actually not forget. Next to the video display, there lies steel surfaces with an imprint of a series of poems, words, and verbs, all of which are legacies of a generational narrative that Hana gets close too in her graduation work titled From alef (آ) to ye (ی).

In this work, Hana treats writing itself as an artefact of remembrance which functions as a movement of double tension. On the one hand, by engaging with the notebook of her father who immigrated from Iran to the Netherlands, she externalizes a generational memory by constantly leaving a trace in another spacetime. Mimicking on a paper and on metal she plays with the idea of a lasting surface, like with how writing started as inscriptions in stones. On the other hand, by the act of copying the words of her dad’s notebook and repeating words again and again, she internalizes the gestures of writing and the memory it signifies into the body.

Three colorfully framed screens display lines of text that the visitor can scroll through. Getting closer, there is a text associated with each day of a month-long calendar. In his graduation work THE BEST IS YET TO COME, Ulysse scripted his activities of one full month in order to render it productive. The writings function as instruction to be reenacted the month after. Next to the screens at a lower-level pictures of the reenacted events accompany the text.

While notions of productivity and labor are at the heart of his work, placing text at the center of space is also a way for Ulysse to reflect on the imperialistic nature of photography. Ulysse says that “through writing he can trace where and how his attention is being formed” as a way of engaging with his own subjectivity more consciously. In our conversation, he pointed to Vilém Flusser’s idea of the duality of the world. The world of images and the textual world which embrace a different form of consciousness.

Writing appears also here in a double movement; on the one hand, it is an approach to form an artistic attention which is ethical. He drew on Geoffroy De Lagasnerie, to problematizes documentary photography as an impossible endeavor that brings a sense of shame. On the other hand, writing itself appears as a labor that alienates Ulysse from the unmediated happenings of everyday life.

Arthur’s graduation work of creating what he calls the blue book (titled as Leven Schrijven – Living Writing), a manual for care, is not really a manual but an invitation to indulge in the discovery of an interpersonal world of elderly people through the writing of personal stories. With a background in illustration, Arthur chose the medium of writing for his graduation work. “Artistic practice is barely centered around writing” he attests and continues that writing for him is a way to get intimate. His starting point is the loss of his grandmother and the longing to have had kept her stories. He then transforms this longing into a journey at an elderly house in which he co-writes the stories of two elderly figures. This way he gives an homage to life lived in different epoch through transcribing and writing their stories.

Arthur’s work takes writing from an isolated practice into something that goes beyond the space of the individual towards a common worldmaking. Writing only happens after sessions of trust making. “Your lives matter, that’s what I tried to convey with writing their stories” he said. This is as much about trusting someone to be the pen of someone else’s stories. The blue book is a guideline for whoever wants to go through the journey of writing, to be the pen of someone’s story.

All these works highlight the poetics and politics attached to writing which needs to be further explored and practiced. My conversation with Arthur ends with a shared wish for the future of art school: a shared wish and perhaps a necessity to develop a program around writing as a medium of artistic practice, a medium which is not only a support in the process of artistic creation, but the main focus of it. A medium which undergoes huge technological transformations and needs artistic care.