Ro Heinrich
Eat my words (work in progress), Rosie Heinrich in collaboration with Katrin Hahner
ro heinrich is an artist-researcher working with grammars of relationality through spoken and unspoken languages. Through (recorded) conversations and collaborations, their practice is multidisciplinary, with an emphasis on film and book making. Her work stages the refusal to separate the human (always already more-than) and nonhuman, world and body. She explores our critical landscapes at the fertile edges of neurodiversity, process philosophy, black study and artistic research, addressing our present predicament at the end of the world as we know it.
ro is beginning a PhD in artistic research with Erin Manning, at Concordia (Montreal), with Sher Doruff and Shira Avni as co-supervisors. They participate in the 3Ecologies Project and several engaged study groups. Their research project we always need heroes¶—on the crises of capitalism, nationalism and patriarchal storytelling—included a 46-minute film work and an award-winning artist book, published with Fw:Books.
Current Research
ro’s research moves with questions towards how a paraontological filmmaking practice—a practice emerging through autistic perception that refuses ontology as a given—might contribute to resistance to the present. Within the wider conceptual landscape of process philosophy, paraontology is one of the key concepts she studies towards (cinematic) practices not grounded in identity and not bound by Being.
The Being of Relation, current work-in-process, featuring the voice of Erin Manning thinking with friends, titled after Erin's forthcoming book
We always need heroes (2020), running time 46 minutes
The multidisciplinary research project we always need heroes¶ (2015–2020) navigates a complex of perspectives relating to Iceland’s “Crash” of 2008. The country was hit hard and fast; but rather than purely economic, the Crash was also the collapse of a collective narrative and myth: a Cultural Crash, as it is locally known.
This research project is composed from over 100 hours of recorded conversations with twenty-one Icelandic interlocutors, including political scientists, philosophers, historians, fish farmers, bank clerks, volcanologists, theologians, social researchers, activists and artists.
From this material I produced new articulations in different media: we always need heroes¶ comprises a 46-minute single-screen film (2020), an award-winning artist book (published with Fw:Books: 2018), a multichannel video installation (2017), a choral work called Rational Inattention (2015–2018), and photo works, light boxes and wall pieces.
Each component plays with language and narrative to readdress the notion of landscape—natural, national and political. By speculating on the politics of perception and selective self-storytelling, we always need heroes¶ imagines a shift in the ways we listen to, generate and perceive our narratives.
we always need heroes¶ (2020) film taster (click here for full film: 46 minutes)
We always need heroes (2020), Rosie Heinrich
We always need heroes (2020), Rosie Heinrich
We always need heroes (2020), Rosie Heinrich
At the belly of belief
Learning to listen: disassembling the voice, (wordless) language, and (self-)storytelling.
In the collaborative act of listening, listeners become the co-author of what is said and its perceived meaning. This is one aspect of how collective narratives are formed – to a positive or negative effect – and how the art of sublime rhetoric functions, where orator and listener transcend into reciprocal meaning-making. Here an orator knowingly delivers an unfinished artwork (a painting of insinuations, a malleable vision) for the listener to complete with her own meaning and, if effective, they collaboratively craft a sense – false or otherwise – of collective belief.
What is our agency as listeners? What do we want to hear? How do we choose to listen?
From the position and perception of the listener – the receiver and meaning maker – I aim to explore our different modes of listening to the voice (projective, receptive, open, active, close, critical) and therein discover new nuances of listening, and our agency in destabilising hardened beliefs and remaking meaning.
My points of departure for this practice-led research are: the voice as a bodily instrument (its repurposing of the tongue, digestive pipe, and windpipe), the ingestion of words and stories, the bodily origins of belief (that gut feeling), the make-up of (collective) memory, the phenomenon of co-authorship, the art of sublime rhetoric, historical notions behind (collective) ventriloquism – or speaking from the belly – (as both a conduit for the past’s dead and a foreteller of the future), displaced and borrowed voices, and languages of the unsaid.
How do our ears read between the lines and fill in the gaps? What orchestrates our listening and perception of meaning? By learning about the power of the ear, what can we subvert in the telling, reception and perception of words and stories, and in so doing the constitution of our belief systems?
more info
www.rosieheinrich.info
Artist book: We always need heroes
Listen to the Podcast
article on how there is no one ˈNÆRƏTꞮV