p. 39 | Nina Wakeford

Nina Wakeford works through performance, installation and moving image to address the unfinished business of past social movements, and the challenges of revisiting their energies. Sometimes she draws from archives. At other times, inspiration comes from friends, lovers and their obsessions.

In this project, her starting point was the death of a friend, Anna Livia Brawn, and a forgotten book. Anna translated a 1930 novel written by an openly lesbian Parisian writer, Lucie Delarus-Mardrus, into English.  In the 1930 novel, the main character lives as both male and female. The author incorporates caricatures of bourgeois ‘celebrity’ lesbians, some of whom were known to have intimate moments while riding in the Bois de Boulogne. Yet the author died almost penniless, and she estranged her family and friends when she refused to end her relationship with a musical hall singer with a working-class ‘Parigot’ accent and ‘vulgar way with words’. Finally tracking down a first edition of the novel in Librairie Vignes in Paris, Nina felt she rejoined Anna again.

As a way to recognise the challenges of revisiting furtive encounters between women as fetishized moments of lesbian history, as well as bibliophilia, Nina develops a combination of recently collected materials: spoken, sung, mediated and transformed.

Nina Wakeford (United Kingdom) is in residence through the 2–12 programme