If my way of working and creating is similar to chatting, it’s because it’s imperative for me to avoid finality; I refuse to systematize or repeat the same thing over and over again. Chatter allows me to tell stories over and over again, always differently; to start from the beginning again and again, without ever getting to the end of things. The small-talker is a person who reveals and knows secrets. Marginalized, they are belittled for saying too much, for being dangerous, for talking nonsense, for going off in all directions. The fluidity of her stories resists endings and linearity.
Small talk as “window, gap, valve, escape, outlet” and “a means of self-discovery, self-revelation,” in addition to being deemed “irretrievable because it is devoid of purpose.” (Suzanne Lamy)
My experiments with the indicible, especially what shouldn’t be talked about in the social space, is an act of resistance to normalized language by provoking the multiplicity of identities and bringing out the plural, the splintering of temporality, the fragmentation of personal and collective memory, and the variety in narration.
Tinkering and chatting means making do with what’s left. After loss, destruction and trauma, what’s left and what do we do with it? To reconstruct memories and stories and make sense of them, the small-talker tries things out. Like a tinkerer, they takes these remnants, transforms them, cuts them up and glues them back together, weaves or knits them to change the weft, the shape, until they become their own. What’s left, the residue of what happened, also tells our stories. Like the unspoken, a mute residue.