Placeholders is a geo-cultural study of names, their origins and their signifiers seeking to bring an acute awareness to the gaze and tone of gendered suffering that has been placed and labelled onto nature.
Nina Hanz
Writer - Critic - Poet
Editor at JAWS Journal
nina.hanz@network.rca.ac.uk
I have written a lot about the human body; its movements and illness; the paradoxes of stillness; and the rapid acceleration of time (and people) passing. But for me, these subjects were always incomplete without a context, the spaces within which we find them, and places which ground them. To gain a deeper understanding, I began to look downwards— under.
I began by looking at the land,
what it has gone through and how its slow movements and tectonic shifts seemed, initially, to teach us recovering.
Statement:
And by looking down, I found all these little things: the gunk that gets stuck under our fingernails, the grit that gets trapped in a clamshell, the tiny particles that make up the enamel of our teeth. Wherever in time or space I found them, they seemed fleeting. My writing was meant as their landing, as their return, as a hardening in time on paper.
