Issue 2, Holding Eva Hesse, FORTHCOMING

The essay Holding Eva Hesse: Treatment by Fayen d’Evie was commissioned by un magazine, for an issue published in May 2020 on the theme of care, co-edited by Rosie Isaac and Elena Gomez. The preamble to d’Evie’s essay refigures the term ‘treatment’ as a reflexive commitment to access within writing and publishing, by framing a text for a print publication as a scripted treatment for a parallel audio text. The skeletal treatment shared within that essay will be used to craft Issue 2 of Re-Locating Echoes, which will consider an encounter with Sans II (1968), a sculptural work by Eva Hesse.

“The dominant structures of publishing are so deeply bound to a narrow idea of a normal perceiving and cognitive body, that there is an urgency to turn to blind, Deaf, autistic and non-verbal mentors to innovate sensorial writing and publishing. This project requires a rejection of capitalist models of efficiency in favour of redundancy. Rather than a singular mode of messaging, build in multiplicity, through parallel texts that convey similar thematic content with perceptual variations. This manifesto has arisen out of friction. Invitations to author print essays grate against my blind-ish practice. By grounding print essays in audio narratives, I hope to sustain the privileging of blind readers, while deploying scripting and transcribing processes to affirm Deaf readers.”

“The earliest known usage of ‘treat’ in the fourteenth century was not in the medical sense, but as an intransitive verb meaning ‘to discuss terms of accommodation’ or ‘to deal with a matter in writing or speech’… An archaic cognate of treat is behandle meaning ‘to touch with the hands’ or ‘to discuss.’ Enfolding these concepts elaborates a discursive structure of care for artworks and audiences. Intimate be-holding encounters may bring close attention to an artwork in one moment in its durational life; these private encounters may be shared with public audiences through ekphrastic audiodescription; and with be-handling, treatments may be crafted that mingle scripting and transcribing, opening space for trans-sensory conversations about how we experience artworks."

Fayen d’Evie, ‘Holding Eva Hesse: Treatment’, un magazine, 14.1, 2020.