Ian Nolan ~ From Turning to Becoming: laments for shattered worlds
Ian Nolan's "From Turning to Becoming: laments for shattered worlds" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 1, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.
Here you will find the documentation of Ian Nolan's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.
From Turning to Becoming: laments for shattered worlds
Ian Nolan's question: How do we inherit damaged landscapes?
Ian's introduction: The arrival of colonialism had the effect of shattering worlds. This shattering becomes a loss, thick with presence, which we mourn. In Ireland, mourning traditionally takes the form of a Wake. Central to this is the ritual act of Keening; a poem, sung aloud, typically by someone close to the deceased. Following no set meter or score, it meanders; revealing emotional oscillations that ornament the air. The song, its utterance, always arrives later. Beginning with the encounter, which always already began somewhere else, sound travels through the body and finds itself in the end, changed. As an echo, a chorus, it returns, alerting us to something, somewhere, yet to be reached. The song, in the utterance, belies a whole relationality, a tangled and haptic existence that is always prior to language; the intertwining of past, present, and future life worlds emerge in the lament as the hum of their contact.
Bethany's report: Sitting on the floor of the stage, the performer engages with sound gear, a microphone, and a laptop arranged on the floor. The performance opens with the sound of wind through a microphone, layered with murmurs in the background. As the performer begins to speak, he shares fragments of his relationship with his father, describing moments of withheld words and unspoken histories. Silence fills the space, inviting the audience to contemplate the weight of things left unsaid and the places where loved ones could not meet. Through a tapestry of sounds, often times from the performers personal archive, spoken words sharing personal stories and theoretical texts, and sounds that negotiate between music and noise, the performer creates a sensory journey that unfolds across scales of trauma—from personal to political, from family bonds to cultural and planetary histories. Through layered sounds and fragmented narrative, the performer explores the ruptures and inheritances that span generations and landscapes, tracing how trauma reverberates across time and scale.
As the performer describes inheriting not only a family legacy but also fractured histories and landscapes, their words echo the shattering effects of colonial histories, displacement, and scattered identities. They reference their father’s diagnosis of brain cancer, which impacted his ability to speak, and links this to memories of their grandmother’s loss of time—experiences that evoke a “shattering” of voice, mind, and memory.
The soundtrack weaves in electronic interference, creating a dissonant hum that intensifies the theme of disruption. A heartbeat-like rhythm pulses through the soundscape, whilst the performer references Sara Ahmed’s ideas of queer phenomenology, grounding the performance in bodily experience and emotional resonance. A woman’s voice glitches into the track, overlaying a complex, layered beat that mirrors the stuttering narrative, symbolizing the fragmentation of infrastructures and identities.
In a poignant moment, the performer reflects on the Irish Great Famine and colonial timelines, mapping historical “shatterings” as moments when lands, identities, and kinships were ruptured by external forces. The performer asks: What can be done with the shattered remnants of history? How do we speak in the face of these losses? For them, there is a language of silence—a native language that the performer themself cannot speak but one that holds unsignifiable wounds and fractured connections to land and memory.
The narrative shifts to a personal interaction with a deer, representing the fragile connection between human and nature amidst environmental and cultural loss. As the soundtrack quickens, the performers speech grows more urgent, culminating in a voicemail recording of the performers father—the last message sent before the father’s passing in 2021. This voicemail, layered with the sounds of the father’s murmurs, evokes both a literal and symbolic distance, capturing the ache of missed moments and the gaps left by loss.
The performance ends with the theme of continuity through gardening. In taking over the father’s garden work, the performer reclaims a space that is neither merely memorial nor stagnant but an ongoing practice of care and continuity. The perfomer describes gardening as a way of mourning that doesn’t just mark a passing but generates new forms of connection, bridging ancestral legacies with the present. Through these gestures, the performance proposes that even in the face of shattering, there are ways to continue, to cultivate, and to speak in forms that hold and transform collective memory.
Antonia Majaca: Antonia responds with profound appreciation, expressing how deeply the performance resonated with her. She is moved by the way the performer integrated sounds and archival components, finding the intimacy of the sounds both beautiful and evocative. The conversations held in the dark added to this sense of closeness, drawing her further into the layered experience of memory and connection. She reflects on how the performance combined these elements beautifully and intimately, leaving her with a lasting sense of admiration for its emotional depth and artistry.
Inti Guerrero: Inti responds with appreciation for the performance and offers a suggestion to further explore certain elements. He highlights the powerful moment when the performer included the voice message to his father, emphasizing how working with familiar materials like texts and voice messages could be pushed further, possibly in a more formal way. This “flashback and presence,” especially as the performer’s speech quickened and the music intensified, created a trance-like effect that was compelling.
Inti notes that the scene reminded him of Aronofsky’s use of black-and-white in Pi, with a similar heightened emotional pull. He also reflects on the historical and political context, pointing to the colonial weaponization of famine, a subject addressed in documenta 14. He sees a connection between the piece’s themes and the current weaponization of resources, mentioning Israel’s tactics in Gaza, which echo past colonial practices.
Additionally, Inti draws attention to the complexity of the colonized Irish experience, noting how Irish men themselves became colonial bodies in places like Jamaica, with ties to the sugarcane plantations. This interweaving of histories, from Ireland to the Caribbean, feels deeply ingrained within the Irish family narrative, resonating with the performance’s exploration of lineage, trauma, and colonial legacies.
Ramon Amaro: Ramon begins his response by describing the performance as a powerful experience that resonates deeply with his own research on the phenomenology of embodiment and the transmission of generational trauma. He finds the piece particularly impactful because it traces fragmented narratives and creates layers of meaning across personal, familial, and cultural histories. The exploration of queer phenomenology, referencing Sara Ahmed, he notes it could be connected further to thinkers like Fanon, whose work isn’t traditionally read through a queer lens but addresses similar existential questions of identity and embodiment.
Drawing on Barthes’ philosophy of topology, Ramon reflects on how Barthes sought to identify his mother through fragments of an image after her passing. For Ramon, it is exciting to see the performer experiment with a similar approach, navigating memory and mourning through a fractured yet profound search for connection. He feels that this approach ties philosophical thought to contemporary experience, especially within the history of Black thought and Fanon’s perspective on identity as fragmented across various structures. This sense of fragmentation speaks to the power of the piece, layering grief across structures and infrastructures, as Kara Keeling also explores.
Ramon notes that the performance captures an “epistemic demonstration” of philosophical thought in relation to personal memory and family history, revealing how individual utterances are interwoven with broader cultural and structural forces. This approach, for him, underscores that the performer is not alone in these questions, echoing a long-standing philosophical inquiry into how we make meaning from grief and trauma.
He wonders how a work like this might evolve, as phenomenology itself often grapples with questions that remain unresolved. The performance taps into something beyond the individual, capturing a flow of affect that connects one to a collective experience—a “powerful project” because of its capacity to resonate beyond the self.
Ramon suggests that the performer “set it free,” encouraging them to explore where questions of shattering and fragmentation might lead. He reflects that while Fanon viewed fragmentation as a form of negation, there’s an opportunity to see it as a kind of superpower—a way to reveal the durability of life and create closer interpersonal relations. This, he says, is the performer’s strength: in exposing the shattering and fragmentation, they unveil a space of resilience and connection.
Since the performance already inhabits a realm where language falters, Ramon suggests embracing silence or alternative forms of expression, such as sonic components, to tap into other modes of communication. He commends the project for its generosity and expresses his eagerness to see how the performer will explore these themes in future modalities.
