‘He sits with his father, unspeaking, holding the old man’s hand, father and son both drifting back to their respective childhoods. Fresh silences begin to emerge between them and the son reflects that far from framing absence, these silences are freighted with all that is now unutterable between the two.’

(excerpt from Andy Lock, Between Our Words I Will Trace Your Presence, 2020)

Between Our Words, I Will Trace Your Presence is a text for performance, which weaves together my writing in response to a number of different silences. It is firstly an exploration of the interpersonal silences, manifest in a relationship between a father and son. The autofictional narrative that has evolved to describe that familial relationship, which creates the central thread that runs through Between Our Words… is framed by a series of allusions and references to other works and texts. From cinema, Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring; from composition, John Cage’s silences; and from literature and poetry respectively, Heinrich Böll’s Murke’s Collected Silences, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. Each of these works, in common with the relationship between father and son, in my work, constitute sites for the purposes of my practice, since they too disclose silences, which are freighted with presence. My conception of the silences with which I work is one that regards them as not only experienced by a subject, but also as being enacted or performed by some party; being motivated and always possessing an unspoken object, which may be explored and possibly disclosed, using artistic practice.

The text of Between Our Words… has so far been performed in a number of forms and iterations, in a number of different settings, for different audiences, including a spoken-word performance for a radio audience, in February 2020 (the version reproduced here), but also as a live promenade performance taking place in the interstice of the UN Buffer Zone, between Northern and Southern Cyrpus, as part of the Nicosia Buffer Fringe Festival, in 2019.

Andy Lock is currently a Research Fellow and PhD candidate, conducting artistic research at the University of Bergen’s Faculty of Fine-Art, Music and Design (KMD). He works principally with creative, speculative writing; performance; radio; artists’ publications and sited installations. A selection of recent work can be found at https://circumstantialevidencex.wordpress.com 

Current work also appears in the book Fluid Territories (2020) available as a pdf at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/380422/554641). 

Documentation of other recent work available on-line, also includes: It’s only when I rest that I sense your presence (2019) an installation created for HKS, Bergen (https://vimeo.com/334831293); In Silence (2018) made for Lausitzer Platz, Berlin (https://vimeo.com/280633634); and The Museum’s Wrong Bodies, a presentation made at Bergen Natural History Museum in 2019 as part of Andy’s ongoing research into the museum’s institutional silences (https://vimeo.com/367316601 and https://vimeo.com/367317974).

Andy’s background is in image-making. He holds an MA in Photographic Studies from Westminster University and he has exhibited widely as a photographer, with a solo show at Eastman House, NY, in 2009, as well as touring work internationally with the V&A. As an image-maker he is perhaps best known for his 2003–6 work Orchard Park, (see Orchard Park, 2006, Impress. ISBN 978-090636191). His work has also appeared in Berberich and Campbell, Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life (2016), and Preston, Interior Atmospheres (Architectural Design), (2008), along with various journals, including Grafik, issue 168 and Exit, issue 26. In 2015, while lecturing at Nottingham Trent University, Andy co-curated, with Fiona Maclaren, In Place of Architecture, a group show and symposium examining the representation of architecture in contemporary photography and artists’ film-and-video.

Through works such as Between Our Words… I’ve been ‘inhabiting’ different manifestations of silence: phenomenal, institutional, textual and interpersonal, at different sites, in an attempt to uncover the relationships and the stories of repression and disavowal, which characterise those silences. As it has developed, my work has compelled me to question both what I mean when I talk about ‘site’ as well as my own subject-position in relation to the objects of my inquiry and I’m particularly interested in site writing’s framing of the notion of ‘site’ to encompass ‘sites – material, political and conceptual – as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined.’

Late Spring (1949), dir. Yasujiro Ozu.

Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, (Faber & Faber: 2019).

Heinrich Böll, Murkes Collected Silences, in The Stories of Heinrich Böll, (Northwestern University Press, 1995).