A Host of Different Emotions
I received the wrong book in the mail. I was surprised to open the package and find the memoir The Inner Voice by Renée Fleming, a Juilliard-trained female opera singer based in New York City. Skimming through it, I quickly realized the life described in the book was worlds apart from my own, a male Autistic artist and architect who grew up in Toftlund, a rural Danish town of three thousand inhabitants. Receiving this book was clearly a mistake – yet something pulled me into it. I was curious to see what I might find if I started to excavate the text.
So I sat at my desk, took out my X-Acto knife, and began to cut, looking for reflections of my voice within the text. Removing matter from the pages revealed the physicality of the book as an object – as a sculpture, revealing the matter of words.
As each poem is layered one atop the other, the reader can read a singular poem from the top cut page, or alter it by adding words from the pages below: nonlinear reading in a three-dimensional space. Highlighting the awareness of the poems as being constructed, first through my work of cutting away, and now through each reader’s work of putting them back together, readers become explorers, discovering new poems by moving through the space of the book along their own path. For the reader to re-inhabit my work, and notice how we can always find some common ground with others, even if it is implicitly small, gives us a place to build from – together.
Source: The Inner Voice by Renée Fleming
Troels Steenholdt Heiredal (b. 1984) is an Autistic, neuroqueer, artist, and architect, looking into the difference between explaining and exploring. He grew up in Toftlund, Denmark, and just relocated to Taipei, Taiwan. His writing has been published on the walls of La Biennale di Venezia, in