Catherine Maffioletti

Catherine Maffioletti 

Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of Arts London 

katz_kitty@hotmail.com 

Extended Abstract 

Reflecting Her: Other Bodies 

~ Towards an Embodied Practice ~ 

Prelude 

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

paper analyses the notion of the feminine through an interactive video art 

installation, (f)low visibility 1 , and the audio accompanied narrative form of the 

paper. Postured through my conception of Luce Irigaray’s theory of intersubject 

reflection and feminine intuition, the feminine appearance is 

considered through seeing and hearing, (and other senses), through video 

and audio. Situating the sensory and technological relationship between 

subject and object in a processual exchange as reflecting bodies, as an 

intuited feminine moment. Written with the Feminist Research Methods 

conference in view, the paper intimates the moment of encounter at the 

intimacy in the encounter panel. A narration composed between three voices, 

the voice of (f)low visibility, the voice of the feminine, and the voice of a 

feminist researcher. Meddling representations between language and the 

body, these voices seek to establish the themes of the feminine appearance 

laterally, coaxing the feminine in order to perform and query this modusoperandi 

of a feminine arts practice and writing. The feminine, as envisioned, 

as the echo, as the sub-scribe, is accented through themes of absence and 

mysticism. 

Be-speak: Authenticating voices 

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 crust, scissor down – too the quick, 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 the 

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

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. 

1

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. 

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 

4 

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

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

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 

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. 

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 

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 

2

(f)low visibility 

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. 

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 

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 

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 

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 

3

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. 

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: 

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. 

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 pointed it they didn’t look at where they were pointing it. 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. 

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. 

12 

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

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

narcissistic point of return… 

‘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 

13 

herself naked.’ 

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 

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 

4


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 . 

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. 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 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’ oh so prescriptive ecriture feminine which I, now, 

derisively, can still only under-mime… 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. 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. 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. 

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 

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 

5




Workshop: Feminist Research Methods: ‘intimacy in the encounter’ 

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 

1




Reflecting Her: Other BodiesTowards an Embodied Practice ~ 

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) 

2




Reflecting Her: Other Bodies.Towards an Embodied Practice ~ 

Prelude 


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 modusoperandi 

of a feminine arts practice and writing. The feminine, as envisioned, as the 

echo, as the sub-scribe, is accented through themes of absence to call on her 

appearance. 

Be-speak: Authenticating voices 

Transcript for audio narration at: 


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

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 

4 

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

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 

5 

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

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

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

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 

7 

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

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

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

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 

9 

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


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, 

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

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 

13 

begged her to strip herself naked.’ 

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 

14 

enunciated as follows, one which ‘my experience as a woman ’ 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 

15 

Beauvoir, yes - I am calling on the mystic 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 

17 

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

Appearance and Apparatus 

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

18 

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

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 

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 

8

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. 

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 

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

ody 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.* 

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 

10

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) 

12

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

Catalogue), Don projects, London, (2000) 

13

Leena Kela 

Performing Goldilocks 

I will speak about a performance series I created and performed in 2007 and 2008 

called Goldilocks Peep Show. First I will describe the textual background, the fairy 

tale, and then I will talk about the structure of the performance. After that I will speak 

about my personal experiences that also form a background for the work. Lastly I will 

say a few words about the mythical and theoretical aspects of the performance. While 

I’m talking I will show you some photos from different versions of the Goldilocks 

performance series, which started in 2003. 

Goldilocks and the Three Bears 

The fairy tale ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ forms a basis for the Goldilocks 

performances, along with an interpretation relating to my personal history and 

experiences. In the story a little girl named Goldilocks breaks into the house of Father 

Bear, Mother Bear and Baby Bear. Curious, she explores their house, first tasting their 

porridge, which is cooling off on the table in three different bowls. Father Bear’s 

porridge is too hot for her; Mother Bear’s too cold; but Baby Bear’s is just perfect and 

she eats it all. Then she sits on their three different chairs. Father’s is too hard, 

Mother’s too soft, but luckily Baby Bear’s is just right–until suddenly the chair breaks 

under her. She tries out their beds. Father Bear’s bed is way too hard for her, Mother’s 

bed too soft, but finally she falls asleep on Baby Bear’s bed, which is just like her 

own bed at home. When the bears arrive back home, the little intruder wakes up and 

escapes through the window. There is no obvious teaching in the story. 

Goldilocks Peep Show 

In Goldilocks Peep Show my character, Goldilocks, is inside a performance booth or a 

room, depending on the context of the performance. The term peep show refers to a 

presentation of pornographic films or a live sex show using a coin- or bill-operated 

gadget, which opens the peeping slot, shuts it after a short time, and requires more 

money to be deposited for continuation. In her peep show Goldilocks is inside the 

performance space. The audience stands outside the room and watches the 

performance through a little hole on the front wall. The spectator has to pay in order 

to see the performance. A one-minute viewing costs one coin; by paying more the 

spectator can watch longer. The performance is given for one audience member at 

time and every spectator will see a different part of the performance. 

The acts Goldilocks is performing can be erotic or less so, varying from the 

provocative and offensive to being even dull and endearing. Sometimes Goldilocks 

might be standing with honey dripping along her leg. Or she might be lying down on 

the floor with apples gushing out from between her legs. Or she might mimic a 

striptease and reveal her very hairy back, armpit or pussy to the viewer. She might 

demonstrate sexual intercourse as or with a bear. Or appear as half-bear-half-human 

character; the head of a bear on a girl's body, or the body of a bear with a girl's head. 

Or she might behave animalistically. She can sense the viewer and become scared, 

defiant, aggressive, curious, demanding, servile, or arrogant. Or there might be no 

Goldilocks at all in the room, just a bear who is manically rocking himself back and 

forth on the floor. Or staring straight at the viewer. Or dancing seductively. 

The audience can see the performer, but the performer can’t see who is watching her.

The performance is intimate, but at the same time anonymous on the spectator’s part. 

After the performance, most of the spectators I have talked with haven't wanted to tell 

me what part of the performance or what kind of action they saw. Most wanted to 

keep it their own private secret, perhaps since some of the actions might have been 

embarrassing to watch, let alone describe. I found that very interesting, since it made 

me—the performer—an outsider, as it was too intrusive to even ask the spectator to 

share his or her experience with me. After few attempts I learned to respect this as the 

nature of the performance, where the spectator is allowed to keep his or her 

anonymity even after the performance is over. The performance is a shared moment, 

an encounter, but anonymous. We can share something very intimate and exceptional 

together, but that happens only in that particular moment and when the moment is 

over, we no longer recognise each other. Like in a confession booth. Or in a sex show, 

in the original notion of a peep show. 

In Goldilocks Peep Show the money deposited in order to see the performance 

is more symbolic than a real fee. It can be any coin and mostly I have received the 

smallest, 5 cent coins. The spectator has to make his or her own decision of how 

much they want to pay in order to see, using the coins they happen to have in their 

pocket. But only the action of payment allows them to take a look and watch longer 

and if they don’t put out more money, they won’t know what happens next. The 

spectator gives the impulse to keep the performance going, and the action is 

performed for his or her eyes only. 

While watching the viewer can also listen to the fairy tale on headphones, but 

all instances of the word ‘bear’ are replaced with the word ‘other,’ so the main 

characters in this story are Father Other, Mother Other and Baby Other, and of course 

Goldilocks. On the back wall of the performance booth there is a video projection, 

which works as a stage set and places Goldilocks in different environments. For 

example, Goldilocks in the bed with Father Bear, Goldilocks eating honey with 

erotically charged gestures, or Goldilocks running fast in the woods trying to escape 

the unknown chaser. 

In the first version of the performance the room was otherwise quite empty. 

Only the objects needed for the action were visible. In later versions, the room was 

filled with trees and the performance seemed to take place in a forest. 

The peep show performance attempts to deconstruct the major juxtapositions 

between culture and nature, human and animal, and between masculine and feminine 

behaviour. Bears have, through the times, been seen as characters with courage, 

power, and strength, and it is with these same qualities Goldilocks now challenges 

them. In Peep Show Goldilocks appears as an erotic, naughty Lolita who exhibits 

herself by playing with the gaze of the viewer and at the same time reveals its 

voyeuristic nature. A feminine ‘other,’ Goldilocks is a girly girl with golden blond 

hair who at times changes into a half human half bear type of character, dominates 

both physically and sexually, and by doing so breaks out from the assumed behaviour 

of a good girl. On the other hand, the bear as an animal ‘other’ already goes over the 

nature/culture division by having a strong mythical history as sacred, worshipped, and 

feared animal, but also by symbolising the cuddly softness of a teddy bear. 

Personal Background of the Performance 

I grew up in North-East Finland. There were many bears living in the area 

around my home town and new bears would also cross the border from the Russian 

side, looking for new hunting territory. I grew up among endless stories of bears: how

some friend or relative of someone met a bear face-to-face in the woods, how the 

bears may come near your house or summer cottage and dumpster dive your garbage, 

how the bears can tease or even kill your dogs, since the bears have become so 

arrogant that they don’t respect the barking dogs anymore. The common message is 

that one ought to fear the bears, not only in the forests, but even in your own 

backyard. For me the bear represented the worst threat. 

I used to have nightmares of bears as a child. In my dreams the bear was always 

after me. And he even came into our home. He would scratch our front door with his 

strong nails, until the door broke open. Or he’d bite his way through the wall into my 

bedroom. Or he’d run after me on my home street, while I tried to manage to get 

home before he caught me. I always woke up before I was caught. These nightmares 

were not something occasional. I remember having them weekly throughout my 

childhood and even when I grew older. I had them until I started to work with bears in 

my performances and adopted the character of Goldilocks six years ago. 

On the other hand, I remember that I loved the stories—usually told by older 

women—describing an encounter with a bear. A woman is picking berries in the 

forest. While she is bending over in order to reach the berries, she suddenly gets a 

feeling that someone is looking at her. It is the bear, a huge male, watching her, 

staring straight at her large arse. The bear, an animal, looks at her. One second feels 

like ten minutes before she manages to get her feet moving and runs as fast as she can 

to escape. And the woman always manages to escape. 

Probably the stories are pure fantasy, since it is said that it is not that unusual to 

be seen by a bear, but to see a bear in the forest is extremely exceptional. The bear 

smells or sees the human from very far off, and just walks away, without the human 

ever knowing such a scene took place. But in these women’s stories, the bear looks at 

the woman. There is a tension in between them, erotic tension. 

A bear is reminiscent of a human in its bodily posture. Bears and people are 

often about equally tall when standing on their two feet. Bears can look like people 

more than any other mammal who goes along on four legs. It is easy to identify with a 

bear. 

In ancient Finnish mythology the bear was considered to be the son of a god. 

People were not allowed to call him a bear, so they came up with many paraphrases in 

order to talk about him or to him. He was called an Apple of the Forest, a Honey Paw, 

and many other names, which were all soft variations on the idea of a bear. Some 

people could also change themselves into a bear and back into a human simply by 

walking around a tree enough times. Then there was a story of a woman, who bore 

half hairy children with a bear. She lived in the bear cave and raised her half-hairy, 

half-human children, who could choose to be either bears or humans. Bear myths also 

claim that the bears only attack men, not women. When a woman meets a bear in the 

forest, she should show her bare arse or genitals to the bear, so that the bear sees that 

he is facing a woman and therefore will leave her untouched. A man the bear would 

kill. 

There are peep shows of bears arranged near my hometown. By paying 140 

euros the audience is taken into a small hut in the middle of the forest, where one can 

watch bears all through the night. The hut is well camouflaged and there are few 

peeping holes on the wall. The audience must stay very quiet. After a while, the bears 

arrive. The organiser of these peep shows promises a 99 percent guarantee that the 

bears will come, and not just one bear, but many. This guarantee has created a 

problem, because they use carcasses in order to attract the bears. By visiting this ‘bear 

kiosk’ every night all through the summer, the bears become familiar with people.

They associate the human smell with easy food. So after people stop feeding them, 

they come closer to villages and people’s houses in order to find something to eat. 

The locals, of course, consider them to be hairy hooligans, which they don’t need to 

tolerate. 

So for me a bear is still a source of many stories. The bears attract and frighten 

me, but through the performances I have found a way to operate in their natural and 

mythical world. I would still pee my pants, if I met a bear face-to-face in the forest. I 

think almost anyone would. 

Theoretical Implications of the Fairy tale and the Peep Show Performance 

But what is the moral of the story of Goldilocks and Three Bears? Is it suggesting the 

sort of person whom one should identify with, between the hard and hot father, the 

soft and cold mother, or with someone who is most like you? Is it teaching that one 

should encounter the other with curiosity and at the same time with respect? Or is it 

promoting respect towards privacy and the property of others? Why aren’t the bears 

teaching a lesson to the naughty Goldilocks? Does she represent an ignorant human 

being, who dominates the animals and nature around her by using them as an 

amusement park to make her little boring life bit more exiting and interesting? 

In the fairy tale Goldilocks has beautiful golden hair. But what does her 

blondness represent? Our brave blond Goldilocks breaks into the house of dark furry 

bears. In European fairy tales blond hair marked heroes and heroines. But is she a 

heroine? Goldilocks comes from a civilised, cultured world, and by getting lost in the 

forest she accidentally finds a house of the three bears, a house for animals in the 

middle of wild nature. And she is so bold that she decides to break into the house, 

take advantage of their property, and leave the destruction after her upon being 

discovered by the bears. One of my early goals in the Goldilocks performance series 

was to find some sort of punishment for her. But I never really succeeded. Her 

original action was so arrogant. 

In Goldilocks Peep Show Goldilocks has sexual intercourse with (presumably) 

Father Bear, and by doing so she is replacing the place of Mother Bear. She is the size 

of Baby Bear, but she has no interest towards him. Baby Bear represents a child, 

whereas Goldilocks represents a half-hairy woman in a child’s dress. She is also the 

desire towards the animal, the desire to become an animal. She changes herself into a 

bear and back. She might become Goldilocks in bear’s dress; at times she is bit less 

human and bit more animal in her behaviour. She is an anthropomorphic animal and 

an animal human. She is in between. 

In traditions of Western philosophy, an animal is wholly other to a human 

being. Their lack of language separates us, since the animals are unable to respond. 

This subordinates animals to human beings in Cartesian thinking. In the Goldilocks 

performances I would rather like to think about how we consider the animal in 

ourselves. In addition to our physical needs, we have our survival instincts, which we 

share with animals. We have our materiality, our flesh and blood that wants to stay 

alive. And to stay alive, we need the other living beings. The body is both human and 

animal. Ethical life and ethical relationship to the other also includes animals. For me 

the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears calls us to question our ethical 

relationship with the animals outside and inside of us. 

In the peep show performance Goldilocks plays with another human being as 

the other. The spectator is on the other side of the wall, watching her through the 

peephole. She flirts with the gaze, she needs the gaze, since when no one is watching, 

Kommentar [AA1]: Pitääkö tämä 

varmasti paikkansa? En ole lukenut 

Levinasia kuin nimeksi, joten en tiedä. 

Ehkä tässä lähde voisi olla paikallaan…

nothing happens in her performance booth. She cannot know who is watching, since 

for her the audience outside the performance booth is a sort of unknown. But she 

knows there is someone there when the peeping slot opens up. If she wants, through 

the peephole she can see the eye watching her, but she knows nothing about the 

person that the gaze belongs to. As a performer of Goldilocks I have managed to feel 

very intimate with the invisible person on the other side of the wall. I have sometimes 

spent moments just breathing together with the spectator and felt that something 

really happened in between our two bodies. The wall in between doesn’t necessary 

prevent us from sharing the same space and bodily intimacy, even though the 

anonymity remains. 

So, when the coin drops into the coin box, Goldilocks begins her act.

Catherine Maffioletti

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