A library worker on night shift is rubbing out the pencil markings in a heavily fingered and annotated book by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She re-traces the circles and crosses and annotations and brackets, imagining who made these marks. The film documents a choreography of hand gestures - thinking with Jose Esteban Munoz' 'queer ephemera'; rubbing out shares kinship to print making. The repetitive gestures encourage an escape from work - a fantasy!

Library workers erase pencil in books in order to digitise important chapters for anyone who can't access the library physically or who relies on screen readers. Rubbing out pencil is an access adjustment. The narrative is carried by animated open captions that situate the viewers as readers. Drawing on Laura U Mark's 'haptic visuality', seeing as touching; the film proposes listening as an embodied practice for the eyes, skin and mouth. I built my own captions into the work from the outset and received feedback from Collective Text, a disabled and Deaf artist-led organisation specialising in providing integrated creative captioning to make artists' films accessible to D/deaf audiences.

The idea of Creative Access Adjustments - access as poetry, as song, as an expansive space for art to spill over into - is led by disabled artists, writers and activists. My practice follows the vital work of: Leah Clements, Jamila Prowse, Bella Milroy, Hannah Wallis, Carolyn Lazard and Collective Text.

Spivak_rub was screened for the first time at an afternoon event I curated - rooting, rubbing, pouring, dancing, treading, clenching: bodying libraries, Goldsmiths CCA, 2024.

Spivak_rub was selected for the Big Screen Southend at Focal Point Gallery. It was screened daily 12-1pm and 3-4pm from 1 September to 31 October 2024.

Spivak_rub has been published in various iterations by: Sticky Fingers Publishing in Masturbatory Reader 2023; In DreamsTimeFree: Soft Tissue 2021 and Performance Research in a special issue: On Libraries 2017 Vol.22, issue 1, March, pp. 134-135

I have performed versions of Spivak_rub live at: scritch scritch scratch, SET Woolwich, Nov 2024; Sticky Fingers Spring Party, The Glory, London, 30 March 2023; hmn 21, organised by Anne Tallentire and Chris Fite-Wassilak, Norman street, London, 26 June 2023; and Bleet! zine launch, MOT venue, London, 21 Sept 2023.

Curator, Mariana Lemos, writes beautifully about the potential of integrated access in the article, Diverse Artists, Diverse Audiences, featuring Spivak_rub alongside work by Carolyn Lazard, Leah Clements and Park McArthur, published by ArtReview, 31 January 2024.

rooting, rubbing, pouring, dancing, treading, clenching: bodying libraries

Screening and performance programme

rooting, rubbing, pouring, dancing, treading, clenching: bodying libraries brings together artists' films that touch on libraries through language, gesture and sound.

These films speak to libraries in an expanded, unfolding sense. There's the actual brick, cement and plasterboard buildings libraries inhabit. Library collections, and the vibrations of these materials in, through and on bodies: sticky, sneezey, screen-glarey, goosepimply. Along with the felt reverberations of what's not or no longer held in libraries. The films begin to archive 'queer ephemeral' embodied libraries - gestures borrowed, shared, cited, returned, withdrawn - : sitting your body weight into one hip or lightly touching the back of the hand to the chin. A library worker willfully leaves the dark crescents of their fingertips in the final scanned PDFs of books as a protest against impossible workloads.

If you weren't able to come to the screening, I've put together this diy playlist of the films that are available to watch online.

Programme