Uninterrupted Dialogue: Melancholy

This project is associated with the presence of melancholy in the transformation of public spaces. Problematizing the process of displacement, sanitization, and privatization of public spaces, Tsuchimoto creates a performative farewell to the disappearing places with video, drawing, and sculpture production.

"Uninterrupted Dialogue" unfolds the historical notion of Melancholy and explores an alternative way to respond to loss and relations with others, places, and society. Tsuchimoto’s starting point for the project (and the title) comes from Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities, the Poem, an essay written by Jacques Derrida in 2004. He describes the experience of Melancholy as a sign of starting “interior dialogue” with the other, in order to understand and “carry the world of the other”. He criticizes Freud who had a negative perspective of the pathology of the melancholic state and insists instead on the necessity of Melancholy in order to be faithful to loss and grief with introjection and remembrance. Derrida’s portrait of Melancholy addresses the very essence of otherness and provokes our imagination of a new possible future to relate to others and other entities. Tsuchimoto researches his texts as well as traces the history of Melancholy / Melancholia in philosophy and psychoanalysis and representation in literature and visual culture through a feminist perspective: by identifying the cultural phenomenon among Western intellectual elites that considered the state of Melancholia as the condition of male genius. She applies the concept of Melancholy to the phenomenon of displacements in global contemporary society, such as the removal from/of places in the context of migration, gentrification, and environmental degradation, considering displacement as one of the significant narratives of loss. Finally, she highlights the embrace of Melancholy as a method to imagine new social bonds and collective futures as well as to crack the neoliberal order by featuring the state of unprofitability and unproductivity in the process of Melancholy.

‘Lokala konstprojekt’ is a part of the Public Art Agency Sweden’s ‘Knowledge hub public art’ which is a government assignment to inspire and strengthen the development of public art in all of Sweden. Within this framework, IntraGalactic arts collective, an artist-run initiative that was aware of the commission, invited an artist research group consisting of artists Malin Ståhl, Hiroko Tsuchimoto, and Anita Wernström. During the years of 2019 and 2020, they have worked collectively with performance as a process and setting up a research process with the coach travel center and service in the county of Jämtland-Härjedalen.