Ocean View (2024)
Prose manuscript in ENG and DE
Booklet printed in the frame of the diploma project MA Contemporary Arts Practice, HKB Cover by Daniel Tschumi; printed at Kollektiv Phoenix in Basel, CH |
Erin Mallon’s writing is concerned with the ambiguity of belonging. In Ocean View, the reader follows a young woman during the course of a day and two nights on a trip to the city. Alice and her squirm travel with a slew of questions in tow: What’s history taste like, and how do you know when a story ends? What choices are really in your hands?
Alice’s story is propelled by the pursuit of a tug she can’t quite grasp, and Ocean View directs its attention as much at the emotional landscape as the material dispositions of Alice’s path. From the sensuous to the foul, a keen awareness for sensation – coupled with the narrator’s persistently self-ironic tone – reveal an immersive physicality in the most mundane situations and acts. Ocean view appears in the frame of the CAP diploma festival in both English and German versions. Written and translated parallel into and out of each other, the two versions have lost their status of original and translation and stand as twin tellings of how a writing practice engages with its own conditions of production. |