”To experiment with ourselves is our only identity. If it weren’t for how arduous, and lonely, it seemed, perhaps I would have become a Deleuzian. Instead I become a mutant. The mutations are beyond my control.”
Experimenting with ourselves is a form of knowledge production. The site or situation where an inquiring subject encounter an inquired object is a space characterized by conventions, but also by risk and uncertainty. Inquiry and investigation begin in an unstable terrain – an uncertainty sometimes problematic, but nevertheless always a condition. So, what do one do when the inquiry includes its very condition, the unstable terrain, the subjective position, the laws and regulations of speaking and being in the world?
Elisabeth Hjorth’s lyrical essay Mutant investigates the (self-)representation of girls, the necessity of autofiction, and the forms for artistic research. You are invited to a conversation on mutations and becoming, devotion and critique, voices and bodies.
Amelie Björck is Senior lecturer in Comparative Literature at Södertörn University, critic, and freelance editor specializing in artistic research and creative writing. Her latest book is Zooëis. Om kulturella gestaltningar av lantbruksdjurens tid och liv (Zooëis. The time and life of farm animals, Glänta produktion, 2019).
Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff is Adjunct Professor in Photography at HDK-Valand. A retrospective of her work, Alternative Secrecy, opens at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in October 2021.
Elisabeth Hjorth is a writer and Senior lecturer in Literary Composition at HDK-Valand. Her book-length essay Mutant was published in January 2021 (Glänta produktion).
