Catherine Maffioletti

Catherine Maffioletti 

Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of Arts London 

http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/47163.htm 

www.catherinemaffioletti.com 

katz_kitty@hotmail.com 

Reflecting Her: Other Bodies 

~ Towards an Embodied Practice ~ 

Programme 2 

Prelude 3 

Be-Speak: Authenticating Voices (Audio Transcript) 4 - 8 

Appearance and Apparatus 9 - 11 

Bibliography 12 

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Feminist Research Methods: ‘intimacy in the encounter’ 



Friday 6 th February ’09 (09:30 – 09:50am) 

Programme: 

09:30 – 09:40 Be-Speak: Authenticating Voices (Audio narration) 

09:40 – 09:45 (f)low visibility (Video screening) 

09:45 – 09:50 Appearance and Apparatus (Spoken analysis) 

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Prelude 

(f)low visibility 

Seeking to speak the appearance of the feminine through the apparatus, the 

paper analyses the notion of the feminine through an audio piece and an 

interactive video art installation, (f)low visibility 1 . Postured through my 

conception of Luce Irigaray’s theory of inter-subject reflection and feminine 

intuition, the feminine appearance is considered through seeing, hearing, and 

other senses, through audio and video. Situating the sensory and 

technological relationship between subject and object as reflecting bodies in a 

processual exchange, as an intuited feminine moment. Written with the 

Feminist Research Methods conference in view, the presentation will intimate 

the moment of encounter at the ‘intimacy in the encounter’ panel. My 

presentation will comprise of three parts, an audio narration composed 

between three voices, the voice of (f)low visibility, the voice of the feminine, 

and the voice of a feminist researcher. Followed by a screening of the (f)low 

visibility video and finally concluding with a spoken analysis. Meddling with 

representations between language and the body, the presentation seeks to 

establish the themes of the feminine appearance laterally, coaxing the 

feminine in order to perform and query this modus-operandi of a feminine arts 

practice and writing. The feminine, as envisioned, as the echo, as the subscribe, 

is accented through themes of absence to call on her appearance. 

(f)low visibility 

1 (f)low visibility, ran for one night, in a London fetish nightclub called Torture Garden, seOne 

nightclub, on the 1 st of May 2008. 

3

Be-speak: Authenticating voices 

Transcript for audio narration at: 

Feminist Research Methods: ‘intimacy in the encounter’ 

ENTER RAIN, WIND AND THUNDER. 

That I would gather these bodies to harness…as a stipend to-carnage: a crack-bloom 

corsage in a lit-match mirage. 

If I were to say that the body of the encounter resides between bodies, over-arching 

bodies, across a score of bodies, a body of under-belly body couplets? So to speak: 

Image me here: Cut-throat croaking, roll-on body swell, blood-lulling – press fast, 

lack-lustre lip, scissor down, cut speech. 

A side note, switching tack - which is to say: I have been actively imag(in)ing 

speaking to you. But my actual tangent is that: I am concerned specifically with 

speaking the feminine, or, is it to say the appearance of the feminine? 

WIND, RAIN AND THUNDER FADE. 

(Interrupts previous voice). Interrupting with ‘suddenly squirrel’ 2 as a machinic 3 

intervention crossbreeding – bleeding Cixous with Deleuze and the proximity of the 

encounter that we are having today. 

ENTER WIND AND WATER TRICKLING. 

A body of bodies entreated to each other in between, rubbing together in the pages of 

conference proceedings. And as I write to you foreseeing this encounter, 

predetermining what I might say – I say it with a principal of foresight, leaning on 

Irigaray , who defines the premonition as coming from her body – as a clairvoyant 4 

body which anticipates what will be seen, this remains to be over-seen . 

WIND AND WATER TRICKLING FADE. 

Irigaray describes the feminine as incorporating an embodied form of foreseeing, 

from the womb, anticipating another body, knowing that body before seeing it, but 

encountering it all the same – and so, intuiting a body as a form of envisioning, of 

seeing. George Bataille’s conception of a flattened hierarchy of knowledge, posits 

knowledge 5 as being constructed from the unknown. That knowing can only 

2 ‘I gain the highest one, and, passing behind the leaves, I open my wings and take flight. Presence and 

absence are my wings. Impossible to separate myself from them. To transcribe my life, with one leap, 

invisible to myself: to be not altogether what I think I am, to escape way up there, to the last leaf, at the 

limit of the species.’ Cixous H, First Days of the Year, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis - 

London, (1998), p. 79 

3 Walsh M, Machinic Alliances, Subjectivity and Feminisms Research Group at Chelsea College of Art 

and Design, London, 4 th of July – 10 th of August 2008. 

4 Irigaray L, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty, 

The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining—Chasm”, Continuum, London - New York, (2004), 

p. 130 

5 Bataille G, The Unfinished System of Knowledge, Method of Meditation, University of Minnesota, 

Minneapolis – London, (2001), pp. 77 - 99 

4

necessarily occur together with not knowing, and so privileging both knowing and not 

knowing as implicit in each others construction. However, this relies on the sovereign 

operation of thought which gives credence to knowing. Even though Bataille and 

Irigaray are concerned with different instances in the process knowledge, i.e. Bataille 

is concerned with the sovereign moment - the epiphany, the moment of realisation of 

knowing, and Irigaray is concerned with the moment before knowing in an absolutist 

sense. I will cut Irigaray’s notion of intuition coarsely with the Bataille’s notion of the 

unknown to reach their common denominator: coming to knowing. Leading to the 

known through the unknown and intuition, hybridising this softly flattened structure 

of intuition/unknowing leading into the intuiting body. A guessing game that as a 

prerequisite must require a sense of belief, (considering Jacques Derrida’s notion of 

belief 6 as either coming from the self or from the other) the not knowing seeking the 

known meddles with the feminine body – has to follow the gut, the inkling and the 

lead. From this principal both the form and content of this paper will perform a 

feminine intuitive form of coming to know, of feeling-out the appearance of the 

feminine through a tacit teasing out of moments in writing an arts practice and the 

practice of art writing. 

ENTER CROWD AND BEAT. 

In looking for the appearance of the feminine I, (f)low visibility, was 

constructed, as an interactive video artwork, in order to look at the relationship 

between, the subject and object, the participant and the apparatus, to 

question this binary opposition. To experience the ways in which a participant 

in an interactive video artwork, such as I, reacts with the live footage which is 

produced by them. When the participant entered me, they entered wearing a 

little camera on their hand – a little camera which was part of my construction; 

the footage from their camera was shown live on a screen which was visible 

to them. Two participants were inside me at any given time. There were also 

two objects which had a miniature camera affixed to each of them. I 

generated four live camera feeds which were projected onto a screen. 

CROWD AND BEAT FADE. 

Exploring the viewing moment between the apparatus and the participant, in which 

the apparatus and the participant are reactively operating. Analysing this instance of 

exchange, the between is crucial, what this exchange consists of in terms of a feminist 

approach to this instance of feminine appearance. By the between I point towards the 

instance which links the encounter of one and the other, namely between two 7 – I 

6 ‘…I may ‘believe something’: I may believe that the weather will be fine in a moment, whether I 

hope so or not, and then what I believe may well then be possible, but without believing something, I 

may also believe what someone tells me—for instance that the weather will be fine in a moment, 

whether I hope so or not, and what I believe then may well be possible. These first two beliefs … are 

certainly radically different: one works through the other’s speech and the other does not.’ Derrida J, 

H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, (2006) p. 3 

7 ‘The other then represents an alteration of ourselves, for better or for worse, someone who is valued 

according to the same criteria as our own identity, a same assigned to an index more or less. Together 

we are not two; at best we sometimes enter into the composition of a great unity: humanity, people, 

family … As long as we are not able to emerge from such totalities, we are never in front of one 

another, beside one another, with one another.’ Irigaray L, Sharing the World, Continuum, London - 

New York, (2008) pp. 36 – 37 

5

would say this if I were to think of Irigaray in one guise. So to use Irigaray’s analogy 

of the metaphor with the mirror, an encounter between reflecting subjects 8 , 

(resituating Irigaray’s notion of reflection here), I might limit the encounter, the 

exchange between bodies as a collision of fragmented reflections. 


Typically the participant entered me and looked to the screen, which was 

divided into four overlapping projections. Some of the projections were 

distorted because of the way the projectors had been positioned at an angle 

in relation to the screen. I got tired. The picture quality of some projections 

degraded, the images became more pixelated as the batteries powering the 

little cameras began to run low. Consequently the batteries had to be changed 

in the little cameras several times throughout the evening. In these moments 

the projector projected the stand-by mode, which consists of a blue screen – I 

felt incomplete. Needles to say the projections were not perfectly rendered 

images. I could tell that these moments disorientated, ruptured and 

fragmented the participants’ relationship with the screen. However, this did 

not deter them from looking to the screen to see. They stayed looking, 

waiting. 

CROWD AND BEAT FADE. ENTER WIND AND RAIN. 

Or, I could align the between with hear-say – and here I have to rely on conjecture – 

the between means a moment which separates, and to paraphrase Helene Cixous, this 

separation, happens across thousands of years and oceans which stop/prevent a 

phone call – that prevent us from picking up the receiver 9 , prevent us from speaking. 

This is really what I am getting at: 

WIND AND RAIN FADE. 

In the words of Clarice Lispector in Agua Viva, ‘I looked at the chair and this time it 

was as if it had looked and seen.’ 10 – and it is with this confrontation in view that I 

address the disjuncture between the subject and the object – of repetition and mimesis 

to bridge the feminine uttered in praxis – speaking an absence 11 , the feminine 

speaking practice. 


8 ‘Metaphorizing has to reckon with this quasi-morphology, these quasi-morphemes (not necessarily 

linguistic), has to compromise with them, even as it contravenes them. Its operation is not so simple. It 

transgresses, an in transfixing the form, or rather its formations, while it presents another form as 

present. It simulates the crossing through mirrors…’ Irigaray L, To Speak is Never Neutral, 

Continuum, London – New York, (2002), p. 148 

9 Cixous H, Let her Letter Go, Lecture given at Queen Mary University of London, 8 th of February 

2008 

10 Cixous H, Reading with Clarice Lispector, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London - Sydney, (1990), p. 23 

11 ‘Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the woman […] It is woman who gives shape 

to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning 

Songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, 

sea surges, cavalcades).’ Barthes R, A Lover’s Discourse, Penguin Books, London, (1990), p. 14 

6

The participants decidedly fumbled around inside me, choosing to look to the 

screen to navigate through me, tripping up over the wires, stumbling 

backwards and knocking into various props that I was made up of. They were 

lead by their hand, well, the little camera on their hand. Pointing it about inside 

me, but as they did so they didn’t look at where they were pointing. They 

pointed it and looked at the screen. That’s why there was a lot of bumping into 

my spare parts. The slowness was like they were not present inside the bit of 

me with all the props, but like they were present with the screen. 

CROWD AND BEAT FADE. ENTER WIND. 

I have to conjure another semblance of Bataille, and this time with Irigaray, to call on 

the feminine’s perpetual absenting, in both their names…her ephemeral accents that 

fragment in voice, the eternal feminine that cannot be pinned down in an appearance. 

By all accounts the feminine remains ‘fixed in oblivion … waiting to come to life’ 12 , 

suspended waiting to be, intuiting, whilst he is one, the feminine works from his 

narcissistic point of return… 

WIND FADE. 

‘When Edward fell back dead, a void opened in her, a long shudder ran down her, 

which lifted her up like an angel. Her naked breasts stood up in an imaginary church 

where the feeling of the irretrievable emptied her. Standing, near to the dead man, 

absent, outside herself, in a slow ecstasy, overwhelmed. Edward, as he died, had 

begged her to strip herself naked.’ 13 

ENTER WIND. 

I enter this dialogue with you, which is also with myself, already knowing that this is 

impossible in itself, and the impossibility of the topic of which I speak – is already 

enunciated as follows, one which ‘my experience as a woman 14 ’ should enable me to 

validate a claim – yet this is so difficult to holdfast to, considering the feminines’ 

slippery (dis)appearances . 

ENTER RAIN. 

Stammering spells – spell binding, spelling out this script envisioned as a feminine 

rhetorical summoning. Staggering across a mystic babbling at the brook of De 

Beauvoir, yes - I am calling on the mystic 15 of The Second Sex; as an allusion to a 

metaphor which is already redundant, casting a mantra spool of Judeo-Christian- 

European values across a well tooled lectern. 

ENTER CROWD. 

And here at the bank of bluffing words, buffering meanings and riddling citations this 

narration attempts to do – to enact what I am about to say. To frame, which already 

12 Irigaray L, Speculum of the other woman, Cornell University Press, New York, (1985), p. 138 

13 Bataille G, The Dead Man, Marion Boyars Publishers, New York – London, (1989), p. 1 

14 Irigaray L, Conversations and Teaching book launch, ICA, 9 th of September 2008. 

15 De Beauvoir S, The Second Sex, Vintage, London, (1997), pp. 679 - 687 

7

means to limit 16 , a contingency plan (this monologue, if all else fails I managed to fix 

this speech somewhere) that already fails again at the gate of Cixous’ 

ENTER BEAT. 

oh so prescriptive ecriture feminine which I, now, derisively, can still only undermime… 

all the while falling short of authenticity. 

And, yes, yes, for the feminine to know the feminine has to appear to see – through the 

body, through touch….more gentle still - more aptly, seeing through a caress 17 . I 

mean the body as a subject or object, with premonition coming from the body as a 

medium, a clairvoyant, foreseeing through caressing bodies that not only seek the 

mirror in the Other. 

ENTER TORENTIAL RAIN. 

Positing the meeting between bodies as a moment of exchange, a reflection - one that 

fraternises with seduction, opulence and the unreliability of the mirror between 

bodies that speak, 

and when I say speaking I also mean reflecting - appearing. 

CROWD, BEAT, WIND AND VOICE FADE. 

TORENTIAL RAIN FADE. 

16 ‘All the future is concentrated in that sheet of light, a universe within the mirror’s frame; outside 

these narrow limits, things are disordered chaos.’ De Beauvoir S, The Second Sex, Vintage, London, 

(1997), p. 643 

17 ‘Thus I never see in that which I touch or am touched. What is at play in the caress does not see 

itself. The in-between, the middle, the medium of the caress does not see itself. In the same way and 

differently, I do not see that which allows me to see, that which touches me with light and air so that I 

see some “thing”.’ Irigaray L, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Continuum, London-New York, (2004), 

p. 135 

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Appearance and Apparatus 

I will begin again here with the problem of entering, of entering into this speech, 

through a porthole – the beginning 18 - a chasm. To no longer watch myself attempting 

another beginning, beyond surveillance of myself here, in a live time exchange. 

Departing now from the safety of this form, arguing for an instance which might 

analogously be interpreted as a feminine methodology through my art practice. 

Across and over – across a ravine of cheap rock blocked metaphors and chip-chop 

ensembles, pawning catchphrase feminist writing equivalents of the body and the 

blood – of embodiment and musings. As a way of entering what is irrevocable in 

voice and the apparatus – shaping surveillance – caught in an attempt to produce 

knowledge that marries the strategies of echoing the feminine with looking at the 

feminine. These themes attempt to conjure the appearance of the feminine using 

audio, (Be Speak: Authenticating Voices), and video, (f)low visibility), not only as 

cheap techno trickery, but, as an exemplary phantasm of her. I remain, seeking, 

speaking the feminine’s absenting to provoke a presence 19 in the feminine’s reflective 

multiplicities and fragmentations, towards articulating the moment of her appearance. 

Guided by my conception of Irigaray’s critique of the visible 20 and notion of 

reflection 21 , I will flesh-out the themes which were flashed through in the audio 

further, concluding through my ongoing analysis of (f)low visibility. Instrumentalising 

Irigaray’s renegotiation of the relationship between the visual and seeing as 

necessarily produced with the body’s other senses through the interior and exterior 

landscape 22 . Irigaray posits the body as a sensory medium, as a clairvoyant body that 

intuits through the bodily senses holistically. Irigaray’s notion of reflection is defined 

as an occurrence between subjects which fragments in the exchange with the other. I 

resituate reflection as a process which occurs between the subject and object, positing 

these as bodies that fragment and allow for a collapse, an instance of unity. A 

relationship which, crucially, affects the body’s convivial reflection and exchange of 

the interior and exterior landscape, and so, my conception of reflection situates the 

subject and object in a reflective liaison which is not limited by a divide between the 

interior and exterior landscape, but is in a constant merging, meeting and rupture of 

exchanges. That facilitates a summoning, a convening, between feminine bodies that 

are in a processual collapse and so actioning her appearance. 

18 ‘At the moment of beginning, even before beginning, slowing down, adagio, and even lento, lento, 

one knows, yes one knows that one will always have to begin again. 

That is to say deploy or multiply the beginnings. 

Which will be each time unique. I will always have to begin again.’ Derrida J, H.C. for Life, That Is to 

Say…, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, (2006) pp. 1 

19 Rose J, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Verso, London – New York, (2005), pp. 225-233 

20 Irigaray L, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, The Athlone Press, London, (1993), pp. 151-184 

21 Irigaray L, To Speak is Never Neutral, Continuum, London – New York, (2002), pp. 148 - 149 

22 ‘And it remains that I only see by the touch of the light and my eyes are situated in my body. I am 

touched and enveloped by the felt before seeing it. 

The question is perhaps that of “situating” or of the translation into my interior landscape. It is the felt 

that should conduct me there. Can I transform, transmute the sensible into some inwardness? How so? 

What will be lacking from this intimate landscape? It will always be incomplete. With regard to the 

movement of my eyes, they do not take place uniquely within the visible universe: they also happen in 

the living crypt of my body and my flesh.’ Irigaray L, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, The Athlone 

Press, London, (1993), p. 165 

9

The watching that happened between the participants, the scene, the props of (f)low 

visibility, were enlarged from the participants’, and the props with miniature cameras, 

point of view on the screen. The participants looked to the screen to guide the camera 

and in turn the projected moving images led the participants’ camera. A symmetry 

was formed, an intuitive symbiotic relationship between the apparatus and the 

participant – in which the camera and the lens – manifested as another kind of eye, as 

a foreigner to the body, as an alien body, at once extending from, and affixed to the 

body of the participant. (The miniature camera and participants surveyed the scene, 

through a collaborative surveillance that re-veiled the scene.) 

Considering the participants’ relationship to the apparatus in (f)low visibility, the 

visual field might be said to be over-there in relation to the seer, the watcher – in a 

separation – but in the course of this distancing there is another more proximate 

instance. Namely, the reactive reciprocity between the participants’ camera 

orientation and the images produced on the screen. A moment which linked, 

connected and took the seer with the viewing field and vice versa. For example, when 

the participant entered the installation, they waved their hand wearing the miniature 

camera in order to identify which screen they were in control of – intuiting the space 

around them – they moved and oriented through both the space that they were in and 

the visual plain of the screen. A doubling was in action on the split between the space 

itself and the representational space of the screen. A kind of reactive relationship was 

formed between the participant and the apparatus. Occasionally looking at the camera 

to reposition it and then faithfully returning back to the screen. A mirroring was in 

action in this instance in the installation, a necessity of reflection that intuits one body 

with the other body, collapsing these bodies through mutual reciprocity. The question 

is: who was directing who? A limitless body, unlimited by separation, which ebbs 

outwards and inwards, situates the collapse between the interior and exterior 

landscape as coming from a feeling body. For watching oneself – the scene that one is 

in, necessarily requires the apparatus, namely the mirror, which reflects, and the 

screen, which in this case projects, and of course the intuitive feminine body that sees 

before it necessarily looks as another form of envisioning. 

The participants in the installation, preferred to see outside themselves and back 

towards themselves through the wires, the pixels, the lenses, and the play of light on 

the screen in the darkened room. Watching the screen, they got stuck, spell-bound and 

mesmerised; the participants bumped into each other, tripped-up and fell over in a 

tangle of wires, props and each other. Their participation was fragmented by various 

sorts of interruptions, e.g. from other participants entering and exiting the installation, 

and the power failure of the miniature cameras, to putting the cameras in dark spaces 

interrupting the images on the screen, etc. Even though these ruptures occurred onscreen 

and off-screen the participant never failed to wait, to look back towards the 

moving images – the participant escaped into the apparatus. Again, I drawstring 

together these techno-frenzied responsive artworks as reflecting a multiplicity of 

manifestations in another rendition: the audio, the screen – as another premonition. 

(As I intuit today a thousand years ago, on another map navigating this text as a 

wordy pictograph, I want to incite this moment as one of reflexivity, of feminine 

appearance). 

*Escaping towards the construction of the apparatus, preferring the technological 

rendering of the real to the real.* 

10

The installation evoked a moment which touched as an interlocutor between apparatus 

and participant – a touch which brushed through the other’s reciprocity, caressing in a 

shared momentum. Though these bodies collapsed, the collapse was mobilised by 

interruptions between participants’ and the apparatus, these ruptures marked the 

fragment with the moments that mesmerised and led each body into the other body, 

affording abounding configurations, bonds and ensembles between bodies, and so 

caressing on a temporal collapse, on an instance of exchange inciting the feminine 

appearance. 

11

Bibliography 

Barthes R, A Lover’s Discourse, Penguin Books, London, (1990) 

Bataille G, The Dead Man, Marion Boyars Publishers, New York – London, (1989) 

Bataille G, The Unfinished System of Knowledge, Method of Meditation, University of 

Minnesota, Minneapolis – London, (2001) 

De Beauvoir S, The Second Sex, Vintage, London, (1997) 

Butler J, Excitable Speech – A Politics of the Performative, Routledge, New York, 

(1997) 

Cixous H, First Days of the Year, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis - 

London, (1998) 

Cixous H, Let her Letter Go, Lecture given at Queen Mary University of London, 8 th 

of February 2008 

Cixous H, Reading with Clarice Lispector, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London - Sydney, 

(1990) 

Cixous H., Stigmata, Routledge, London, (2005) 

Derrida J, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, Stanford University Press, Stanford - 

California, (2006) 

Irigaray L, Conversations and Teaching book launch, ICA, 9 th of September 2008. 

Irigaray L, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Continuum, London - New York, (2004) 

Irigaray L, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, The Athlone Press, London, (1993) 

Irigaray L, Sharing the World, Continuum, London - New York, (2008) 

Irigaray L, Speculum of the other woman, Cornell University Press, New York, (1985) 

Irigaray L, To Speak is Never Neutral, Continuum, London – New York, (2002) 

Robinson H., Reading Art, Reading Irigaray – the politics of art by women, I.B. 

Tauris, London, (2006) 

Rodriguez C, Not this, not this, not this, in James A-M & Bailey J (eds.), Mai-Thu 

Perret 2012 (Exhibition Catalogue), Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, (2008) 

Rose J, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Verso, London – New York, (2005) 

Walsh M, Machinic Alliances (Exhibition Catalogue), Subjectivity and Feminisms 

Research Group at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, (2008) 

Walsh M, The Length of a Wave, in Cambell C (ed.), Bilis 2000 Front (Exhibition 

Catalogue), Don projects, London, (2000) 

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Catherine Maffioletti

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