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Ethnographic Poem: ‘Re-searching the 4th Space’

This is a poem I wrote in March of 2019. It is an auto-ethnographic poem about my experience as a practice led researcher (and journey from June 2010 until early 2021).

I undertook a doctoral research inquiry into the collaborative creative process (emergent space and subsequent transformations) between artists, people with their communities and institutions. This poem was written along the way, and reveals a process of critical, reflexive, relational and performative inquiry: that led me to re-visit and “re-search” the places, the sites of practice, the collaborative creative projects, interconnected webs of relationships, as well as spaces I thought I knew. Further, how this generated new insights in praxis.

The poem is made of a number of parts that revealed themselves over the course of the research. It includes embodied narrative with my own self discoveries and autobiography as the researcher, generating auto-ethnographic based text in relation to the research, as well as (auto)ethnographic performance with mask and photography. The poetic text and imagery reveals the dynamic overlays and interplays between them. The image sequence performed in the place where one of the significant research discoveries and interconnected narratives (of women artist/practitioners), that further led to the writing of ‘Bone Poems’ (see Prince, 2018).

Re-searching the 4th Space

Part 1: In the beginning

This story begins with a mask, at the end, she appeared

through her

the story unmasked

now re-told through me.

II.

It took me years to find her to shatter and re-search what I thought I knew and for all the pieces to come together anew.

III.

I stumbled on a messy web a tapestry of dynamic interconnections

IV.

I saw the butterfly not caught but shifting spaces of change.

I saw relationships interwoven over time, place people, projects and space connected in unexpected ways.

VI.

I was lost deep in the forest far left of centre in a “disorientating dilemma” I stumbled on the bone of munitions and radioactive waste,

VII.

Divergent narratives converged my perspective shifted and she opened a door.

VIII.

I learned the poetic and metaphoric can access dimensions that linear narratives do not.

IX.

Yet the weight of what I found I could not bear.

My body was wracked with adversity when my teacher appeared

chronic pain is a high-pitched scream that no-one else can hear

in the darkness, I found her here,

XI.

yet she was fully un-formed.

XII.

Dreaming and making her awakens something indescribable in me through her I move between worlds of researcher, practitioner and artist

(Alchemist, Storyteller, Sage, ‘Larakina’[1] or a Trickster, maybe) [2]

XIII.

Making her I found courage to speak the unspeakable to see the unseen.

Part 2 : The forgotten dark I.

I always wondered what the dark was in me the one that could not speak.

II. Dark roots take hold across my body, - who is she?

An ancestral thread in the maternal line the old ones do not speak.

III. I see her I see me I see dark deep ink eyes, that see in moonless nights.

Part 3: Raison d’etre

I. Out of the silent movement of flour and water, layers of paper and paint made upon my table she revealed herself to me.

II. Who is it, that is she?

III. Is she ‘La Loba’ [3] who sings back the shattered bones guiding me to each piece?

Is she the clue that fell from the mouth of my great Aunt the last oral trace my family barely speak?

Whine long and of no words all dirge then to us as children she would speak:

“you come from the Gypsy’s but don't tell a soul or taken you will be in the middle of night”

Woven thread of black hair others with ‘olive’ complexion Dutch migration, pathways of Sinti Romani?

My grandmother’s great aunt the Russian dancer they called “madame ruble” Is she thread of my Eastern European and Middle Eastern DNA?

An ancestral lineage who in us tremble with fear and yet not erased.

IV. Is she the life force that enters the souls of my feet?

Uncontrolled not on command not on begging but when the conditions

align the stars and moon alight from the soul to earth to my feet

is it she who rises in my belly, my chest through my eyes, and breath?

My body expands trembles and breaks her gravity pulls me closer.

Part 4: Other Ways to Be

Portrait of the author, photo by Richard Prince, 2019.

I. Is she Ataecina rising?

II. Or the wind of ‘el duende’[4] one my teacher named in me?

III. Is it she – the broken hill when I stood in-between

the ruin and mint bush?

Beneath the cedar pines not as alone as it seemed in the time I could not hear and before I had learned to speak?

Is she bride of ‘Bluebeard’ [3] blood appears

that will not let her sleep the one who will not be free until she turns the key?

IV. Is she Aletheia [5] who tears transparent holes in my skin

Is it she that can see into other worlds and ways to be?

Part 5: The un-concealed

I. Guardian of dreams and metaphor, storyteller of transformation,

II. Both that which is revealed and concealed the unexpected and interconnected lead me to abandoned train tracks and a broken trail of bones [6]

III.

I am still haunted by a single question

IV.

“Why are there men in white suits testing our soil” asked the two women who lived down the street?

I re-opened unanswered questions I bit the apple unknowingly I ate the fruit.

V. I search and (re) search a landscape and stories I thought I knew.

Barbed wire, surveilled spaces secret places questions lay in boxes versions of the truth spun in webs

breathe in breathe out, soil of life

breathe in breathe out, light of death.

VI. Why did our superiors instruct us not to speak ? VII. Why were the two women’s questions erased? Who will know the intentional ‘empty spaces’ in the final government data and reports ?

VIII. A crack is revealed stories that were concealed in their multiplicity, now bend towards the light.

IX. Amidst institutional resistance, my relationships with the artists turned impenetrable stone for it was not the community alone, but artists who worked with these communities who also carried hidden stories of the bone.

Sensory Poetic Relationship Mapping (SPRM) experiments by the author, photo by the author, 2015.

Moving, singing, making an ‘aesthetic space’[7] a theatre of relationships mapped out on my kitchen table

insights in practice interweave theory, and bleeds into practice changing me

a theatre of the 4th Space enacted and all that lays in-between.

XI.

Witness to the configurations of transformations taking place, those that cannot be seen

nor measured (by linear means) the ephemeral and that which is still yet to be.

XII. The illegitimate, erased, the undocumented buried, do not see the light

flowers in the desert that bloom in the deep of night

here in Western Sydney amidst toxic waste sites

stories from women who saw the ‘Bluebeard’[8] now speak, beneath us out of ‘sight’

the water still flows those that we do not know and have not yet come to know are all legitimate transformations.

Footnotes

[1] Hodge, B., G. Coronado, F. Duarte and G. Teal (2010). Chaos theory and the Larrikin Principle: Working with organisations in a Neo-Liberal world. Advances in Organizational Studies. Egypten, Liber, Copenhagen Business School Press.

[2] Irwin, R. (2015). "Becoming A/r/tography." Studies in Art Education 54(3): 198-215.

[3] See: Estés, C. P. (1995). Women Who Run With the Wolves. New York, Ballantine Books, The Random House Publishing Group.

[4] This references teachings I received in oral transmission and experiential exercise with Michael Meade. We went into the forest and were each given a word on wood to work with for the next 5 days, the word I received in this practice was ‘Duende”. This was followed by a profound personal experience on the 5th day that was shared with Michael and he said was the ‘duende’. This term is discussed at length by poet and writer by Fredrico Garcia Lorca in ‘the practice and theory of duende’ see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCbus6UHKD4 . It is discussed at length by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, (1992, 1995: p.20 p. 519) who refers to ‘El duende’, her work specifically is discussed further in this overarching statement in ‘Old Stories and New Eyes”.

[5] I acknowledge a conversation with Dr Fiona McAllan who introduced Aletheia “the most important Greek counterpart of our ‘truth’ “(Wolenski, 2004, p. 341) to me.

[6] Teachings on retrieving the Bone received in oral transmission in teachings “Original Voice” with Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Colorado, 2016.

[7] See: Boal, A. (1995). The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy. London, Routledge.

[8] See: the story of the Bluebeard as retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (1992)

Further Links:

Prince, C. (2018) ""Bone Poems: Listening and Speaking from the Ground", Ethnographic Edge Vol 2

http://tee.ac.nz/index.php/TEE/article/view/33/24

Podcast reading of poem 1 from ‘Re-searching the 4th Space’

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/wildazurebutterfly/episodes/2020-09-23T04_12_48-07_00

#4thSpace ethnographicpoetry #(auto)ethnographic performance #autoethnography

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