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issue19-cover
Issue 19
Winter 2018
The Era of Brokenness

Issue 19

The Era of Brokenness

The Era of Brokenness

Dominique Hecq
In a world about to go down in the history of the human race, it seems that we exist in a recurring dream of disenchantment. Toys, bodies and spirits break. Machines and systems and cultures and societies break down. Relationships and signifying chains break up.

‘Becoming’ Anew in Online Time and Space

Jamie Wang and Stephen Muecke
The University of New South Wales
The computer, Alpha Soixante, said in 1965: Reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread around the world. Since then, Big Dada, today, has an even more dangerous fantasy...

Sky

Rina Bruinsma
Deakin University
Sky explores the role of physics and mathematics in seeking to describe the way things are and whether it is possible for things to be any other way.

Worms and Time and Words

Susan Pyke
The University of Melbourne
May holds her workers carelessly in two hands, as a rich woman might hold various strings of pearls. Some rear in fright or fury, others spill over her palms, dive-dropping back into the dank dirt of their work.

The Broken Body

Heather Taylor Johnson
The University of Adelaide
Invisible illnesses are whispers, often so quiet they’re not heard. Why it’s taken me sixteen years since my diagnosis to dedicate this writing to disease. Why if I read this work aloud, I won’t make eye-contact with my audience. Sometimes there’s comfort in invisibility, fear in coming-out.

The Analyst’s Laugh

Jennifer Rutherford
The University of Adelaide
She walks into the crowded room and he turns and sees her, and in that same moment, his hands lift his coat from the seat beside him as if he has been holding it for her. Through this single gesture he ensnares her, although there are many gestures, and each one doubles the knot.

Like Clay

Julia Prendergast
Swinburne University of Technology
It’s called an olfactory hallucination. It means you smell things that are not there to smell. It’s not that weird. We all conjure things that aren’t there. What do you think memory is?

Scary

Dominique Hecq
SCARLETT: a woman in her thirties. LOVEY: a caring woman in her fifties. VOICE OFF: Mother, a histrionic woman in her late sixties with early onset of dementia. She speaks in a voice ranging in a variety of moods from the past. She is shrill and sarcastic, sometimes melodramatic, but always brittle

Defecting

Andy Jackson
The University of Adelaide
Defecting is a collection of poems of bodily otherness. The poems inhabit otherness from within extraordinary embodiments, but also as an ongoing undercurrent within the everyday.

Rhapsodies of the Prostate

John O’Carroll
Deakin University
Forgive me in advance for addressing you directly. I did not really know how to start. For some reason, I feel as if I hear you breathing, wondering, thinking.

Keeping Billy

John Charalambous
At eighteen, I left my home in Auburn, New York State, to go travelling for David Wadsworth and Company. My sister Laura had cleared out before me. She found a husband to take her away. I chose agricultural implements.

Migration

Josephine Scicluna, Daniel Dewar and Nao Anzai
I’m high on the cliff path above Coogee my bare feet tender on shallow waves of rock like ossified sea/ behind the real sea it seethes/ into icing surf and swirls the rocky outcrop of Wedding Cake Island.

The Riddle of the Saviour and the Swallow

Anamaria Beligan
Five minutes to nine. Three steps to the right… now turn left… fifty-nine steps… all the way down to Ward D. Room twenty-one, where the film crew people are. Knock on their window at nine sharp, ready for our daily exchange: my stories for their coffee and no filter cigarettes.

Untitled: Entering Ekphrasis

Dominique Hecq
The third day of our Double Dialogues conference at the National Opera Center in New York was devoted to visiting MoMA where we explored some Ekphrastic possibilities.

Ekphrasis: Futurist Ruptures? Cubist Ruptures?

R.A. Goodrich
The University of Melbourne & Deakin University
Over fifty years ago, in the March/April 1967 issue of New Left Review, the late John Berger’s sixty-year commemoration appeared of a seminal artistic change which he dubbed ‘The Moment of Cubism.’

Ekphrasis: Two Versions, One Eye

Amelia Walker
The University of South Australia
Do you remember that day? All those days we stretched out, bellies up, eyes like oceans

Ekphrasis: Those Apples

Jamie Hayes
The tablecloth shows light and dark. The shadows reveal depth. It’s what I expect. That piece of fabric proves there’s the all important z that lies beyond the x and y. It’s all about depth right? The cloth seems to agree.

Ekphrasis: I Thought I Saw My Father in the Picture’s Glass

A. Marie Carter
If I stand to the left, just out of frame, I could be next: two baying mouths with tongues as red as the Lady Danger lipstick I keep secreted in my purse ziplocked.

Ekphrasis: Woman Quaerens Devoret

Dominique Hecq
Leo Spitzer defines ekphrasis as ‘the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art, which implies, in the words of Théophile Gauthier, “une transposition d’art”, the reproduction, through the medium of words, of sensuously perceptible objets d’art’.

Ekphrasis: I Am

Rina Bruinsma
Deakin University
I I am I am the Deep Surrounded and swimming in the black expanse The passage from the outside of me to within

Untitled: Exiting Ekphrasis

Tilly Houghton
Deakin University
I don't know how I would rewrite the history of civilisation. The Holocaust wouldn't be the foundation of Universal Human Rights. The Crusades may well have happened over a different religion. There would have been a sceptic in the vein of Nietzsche or Freud.

The Winter issue of Double Dialogues alerts us to what might be called 'the era of brokenness'. We arrived at this conclusion at the term of two Double Dialogues conferences—one held at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, the other convened at the National Opera Center in New York—where artists and academics sought to answer ‘why do things break?’ The year was 2017. A mind-boggeling and heart-breaking year… The works gathered here address the question of breakage in a variety of forms and styles, and from diverse perspectives, including ekphrastic responses to other media.

 

Double Dialogues | Refereed Arts Journal | ISSN 1447-9591  
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