Projektteam / Project Team: Marie-Andrée Pellerin, supervisors: Gudrun Rath and Gerda Lampalzer
Art der Förderung / Funding Scheme: Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), from Quebec province of Canada
Projektleitung / Project Lead: Marie-Andrée Pellerin
Projektlaufzeit / Period of Funding: 09/2017 – 12/2021
Institut / Department: PhD Program (multidisciplinary: Cultural Studies & Time-based Media)
ProjektpartnerInnen / Project Partners: Gudrun Rath (Kultur- und Kunstwissenschaften) and Gerda Lampalzer (Zeitbasierte Medien)
Language and its logos have been used from an anthropocentric humanism standpoint as a modality of exclusion, to elevate mankind above the “primitive” Other, who hasn’t been gifted with speech and the ability to produce meaning. The research is looking at how feminist science fiction writers identify language as a tool for exclusion and domination, and consequentially propose a posthumanist approach to language in its various attempts to communicate differently with the Other.
Considering the problematic rigidity of language and the absence of words to name marginalised concepts and beings, could science fiction be seen as a praxis of language disturbance? Feminist Science Fiction and fictive words coined in its literature will be seen here as a way to explore the concept of language fluidity, and therefore challenge the finitude of a concept or the authority of universal definitions. The manifold and inventiveness of fictive words and meaning constructions in feminism SF would therefore promote a more organic use of language, which is characterised by an “ongoing process of signification”, training our abilities to name what still has to be named. Those selected stories represent attempts to shift from a consolidated and unified subject to a practice of partial identities, nomadic subjectivities and of becoming-molecular.
My research will draw its theoretical background on Donna Haraway, Julie Abbou and Rosi Braidotti writings, as well as on Feminist Science Fiction novels written by Ursula K. Le Guin, Élisabeth Vonarburg, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin, Vonda N. McIntyre, etc. My phd will be carried both on a theoretical level (literature and cultural studies) and artistic research, building a corpus of time-based artworks, falling within the series “Language Experiments #1, #2, #3, etc”. The video and sound works developed in the framework of this artistic research in collaboration with several authors, explore some aspects of language fluidity in science-fiction, through various experimental audiovisual techniques such as: overlapping of different voice registers and languages in the soundtracks, manipulation of audiences through subjective subtitles, narrative scripts including science-fictional elements, short excerpts of SF stories in voice-over, etc. Language Experiment #1 was presented at Studio XX in Montreal in 2019 and Language Experiment #2 was presented in two different forms at D21 Kunstraum in Leipzig and Centre d’art actuel Bang in Chicoutimi (CA) in 2020.
The three first years of the research are kindly funded by the ‘Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture’ (Quebec Research Funds for Society and Culture), from Quebec province of Canada.
Kontaktperson / Contact Person:
Marie-andree.pellerin@kunstuni-linz.at
PhD office: DO.0429, Kunstuniversität Linz, Domgasse 1