Beyond regimes of signs: making art/istic portrayals of haptic moments/movements with child/ren/hood

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we try to move beyond fixed narratives of child/ren and childhoods, a fixity that comes, in part, as a consequence of the adult/child dyad. We undertake a cutting together-apart of childhood photographs which allows us to explore the complex machinery that produces the categories of child/ren as human beings that are, variously, de(scribed) as not only ‘natural’, ‘innocent’ and ‘romantic’, but also ‘uncanny’ and ‘sexual’, tropes that find meaning and depiction through child/hood bodies and faces. Inspired by non-representational ethnography, we want to generate pictorial acts that move beyond the face – ‘as regimes of signs’ so that body and language can interrelate where ‘the configuration of the face is inextricably tied to the evolution of the voice’. In undertaking a form of schizoanalysis, we undo images of child/ren/hood from ‘the inside’ by connecting to haptic thinking as well as cutting together-apart, processes that allow us to think otherwise about our own and other childhood(s). Additionally, we want to liberate child/ren/hoods through artistic photograph sensing, and doings may be seen as a political act, a way to break down boundaries of power through art as events.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-representational theory
• photographs
• child/hoods
• affect
• cutting together-apart

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from Professor Liz Jones during the writing/making of this paper.

Notes

1. Since our article is a kind of artistic text through poems, haptic signatures and making photos and text different – we unfold and disrupt the text by not making a linear logic. As such, our rhizomatic ideas may sometimes call for special attentions from the reader to follow.

2. Our critique relates to how child developmental psychology makes universal linear production of childhood.

3. These portraits are borrowed from https://www.flickr.com/photos/pellethepoethttps://www.flickr.com/photos/pellethepoet

They are licenced under creative commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

(a) Portrait of a young boy by William Samuel Wright (c.1870s) https://www.flickr.com/photos/pellethepoet/8523398147/in/photostream/

(b) Portrait of a young boy with a dog and a gun by Karl Sammler (undated) https://www.flickr.com/photos/pellethepoet/7466932758/

4. https://silverbirchpress.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/405px-franz_kafka_-_4_jahre.jpg

5.

Time travelling baby … to the past through the future. Flesh, paper, pixels … transformational materiality. A.H.

6.

1972. When I look at this photo from my album from the time when I was a little child, suddenly a whirling feeling of strangeness and familiarity occurs. What do I see as a child? … and what am I looking back at as an adult? Caught in space-time-matter(ing). A.H.

7.

Suddenly I was there, just one – figuring in a family album created 60 years back – by my mother, portrayed by someone else, and created between executed and representation (Benjamin) by her/them. A.M.

8. Children created these portraits during a project about themselves and their bodies in a Norwegian kindergarten. We have permission to use it in this paper.