The curator and writer Isabel de Naverán carries out the project The wave in the mind since February 2021. The wave in the mind is an investigation area focused on writing as a kind of curatorship. Placing particular emphasis on corporal perception as the connector channel for sensorial and intellectual senses, the project seeks to rehearse a writing, which at the same time is a listening device and research methodology, i.e. a material, physical, sensitive and sensual essay writing. The wave in the mind takes its name from the original title of Ursula K. Le Guin’s book "The Wave in the Mind. Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination” (2004), published in Spanish as Contar es escuchar. Sobre la escritura, la lectura, la imaginación.
When choosing the original title –“The Wave in the Mind”–, Le Guin was inspired by a letter Virginia Woolf sent to the poet, writer and garden landscapists Vita Sackville-West in 1926. In it, Woolf insists on the importance of finding the appropriate rhythm in writing. This process requires to physically place yourself in a sensitive observation mode, which Woolf compares to the movement of a silent wave starting out at high sea in the middle of the ocean and gradually moving towards the shore. According to her, the task consisted of detecting the movement of that wave as it approaches, breaks and settles as foam. Only then, as she states, can you recognise the rhythm underlying the words.
Taking over, de Naverán describes her hypothesis as follows:
"I wonder whether writing might be a way of creating a place on several levels, such as spatial, mental, identity, and time; and whether it might be a way of connecting to what has impacted us, likewise a way of making a world from the nearest point. La ola en la mente is an attempt to put somatic writing into practice, which is different from the so-called performative writing insofar as it doesn’t (or not only) act on the body of the person reading it. Somatic writing shows how History is etched on bodies via learnt, inherited or imitated gestures. It also shows the forms of perception physically incorporated, the way we look, feel and see, and the ways of narrating, speaking and talking. In this sense, it assumes language as something material capable of seeing and revealing the different strata comprising the relationships with that which addresses us in art research. Furthermore, it is a corporal thinking practice which questions the concept of body as anatomy, i.e. a physical space that delimits and contains individual non-transferable subjectivity".The wave in the mind continues Isabel de Naverán‘s previous investigations about the place occupied by bodies and gestures in a reconfiguration of relationships with the world.
Thus, her first year as an Azkuna Zentroa associated researcher coincides with the publication of her first two books as an author. On the one hand, Envoltura, historia y síncope (Caniche, 2021), a long research project that sets the death of dancer Antonia Mercé and Luque, “La Argentina”, in dialogue with the abrupt collapse of the Second Republic in July 1936. This is a research where the body is presented as the place from where the story emerges, interweaving images and texts in a writing likewise affected by the attempt to narrate. On the other hand, Ritual de duelo (consonni, 2022), a writing that runs like a mental voice endeavouring to recover the physical sensations experienced during the collective accompaniment of her own mother’s death.
According to the researcher, both the writing process and subsequent publication “go hand-in-hand, and we could say they generate the desire that moves “The wave in the mind” to become a place of reflection which places writing at the centre of the action while seeking to explain how any writing inevitably always occurs during conversation and in contact with other voices.”
In methodology terms, The Wave in the Mind takes the form of a correspondence letter format, which is understood to be more than an exchange of letters.
Starting from this premise, since 2021 de Naverán has maintained four-way correspondences with Lorea Alfaro, María García Ruiz, Raquel G. Ibáñez and Andrea Soto Calderón. From different spheres –art, architecture, design, philosophy– the work of the four guests’ challenges and interferes with some of the questions that sustain and feed the research contents of The wave in the mind.
Description:
Between 2021 and 2023, this proposal has had different phases and formats open to the public: a meeting, a reading group, a podcast series, a seminar and finally a polyphonic book of the same name.
PROGRAMME:
January 13, 2022 - Envoltura, historia y síncope. Performative conference. Introduction by Andrea Rodrigo.
September 7 and 8, 2022 - The Wave in the Mind. Reading Meeting. Meeting with Lorea Alfaro, María García Ruiz, Raquel G. Ibáñez and Andrea Soto Calderón. Along with Alejandro Alonso Díaz, June Crespo, Estanis Comella, Pablo Marte, Karlos Martínez Bordoy, Ion Munduate and Idoia Zabaleta.
October-December 2022- The Wave in the Mind. Secondary Orality. Podcasts serie with: Lorea Alfaro, María García Ruiz, Raquel G. Ibáñez and Andrea Soto Calderón
January 10, 2023 - The Wave in the Mind. On Writing, Image, Gesture and Body. Seminar. Speakers: Lorea Alfaro, Marie Bardet, Emanuele Coccia, María García Ruiz, Isabel de Naverán, Andrea Soto Calderón.
