Materializing palimpsest: interrogation into palimpsestuousness as a queer enactment in artistic research

Contemporary theories and art practices that embrace the metaphor of a palimpsest find their grounding in the layered form that this concept speaks of. As such, they represent matter and meaning as a collection and assemblage of individually formed structures that can create a work of art via a constant move of superimposition. This practice-led research argues for a way of creating a palimpsest as a form of spatial and temporal (dimensional) enactment. This discussion is developed and embodied throughout drawing parallels between the formalisation of the palimpsest, as presented by Sarah Dillon in The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007), in which she develops a strategy for rethinking history, subjectivity, temporality, textuality and sexuality, and an analysis of conceptual bodies established in the philosophical works of Michel Foucault. I aim to adapt Dillon’s argument to develop a model of palimpsestuousness, an original and wearable synthesis of matter and meaning, that allows for the creating and understanding of palimpsestuousness as something beyond a layered structure. This process aims to show that through a focus on the intensity of intimacy that emerges from multiple encounters, notions of ars erotica, subjugated knowledges, parrhesia and heterotopia become embodied forms of queer art practice, which can challenge and expand on contemporary methodologies in fine art practice-led research. The aims are specifically explored in my performance, video and photographic practices and at the same time they influenced form and materiality of this thesis submission itself by deregulating, and with it challenging, the notions of presupposed causality and linearity when creating and sustaining discursive, critical argument. The series Fatima focuses on the performative understanding of palimpsestuousness as a non-layered dimensionality. Through the series of short films entitled Heterotopias I develop a vital multi-voiceness that speaks of its domestic-like quality. By referencing the body of work of artistic duo Lovett/Codagnone and literary texts of Jean Genet, I demonstrate the necessity of including sexual and erotic art in experimenting with plural and non-layered methods of producing matter and meaning that refuse hierarchy