DisplacementActivities

Tabula Rasa

This piece has been a long time in the making and unmaking. I first came across the word ‘stet’ when I was working in the print industry back in the 1980s. Hot metal was being displaced by phototypsetting and alternative ways of printing that prefigured our current reliance on digital technology. The got rid of all the wooden fonts. All the re-useable type.

It struck me as ironic that even the notion of ‘stet’ was being displaced. We can erase the whole of history. I recall Rollerball. So funny, and yet so poignant and possibly more relevant now than it was then. Has it achieved anything? I’m not sure, other than lodging in my brain since I first saw it back in 1975, with my dad. He also liked it.

I think this piece forms part of ‘Lie of the Land’ series, since it combines spoken word with image and sound work while focusing on aspects of my/the past. Not quite sure what it amounts to yet, but it is useful to see them as gradually coalescing and becoming more clear. I love words, but they never quite get there. I am thinking about the quest to erase a people only becoming possible by destroying absolutely everything, especially the origins of that quest. Ho hum, back to the drawing board, to the Tabula Rasa.