ventriloquism

In the show entitled Altermodern at Tate Britain, Lindsay Sears exhibits an installation Extramission 6 (Black Maria) which documents her life as an artist. We learn that as a child she did not speak but retained an eidetic memory, capturing images of the world around her like a camera, recording, documenting, storing, archiving, measuring the world as the reader measures a text, progressing from one page to the next, without the need for speech, building with her pictures a repertoire of responses, of interpretations. At the age of eight she began speaking, projecting words into the world, and as she spoke, her eidetic memory faded with the onset of language. To cope with this traumatic memory loss, as images faded, she explains how she became a camera, holding light sensitive papers between her teeth and using her lips as the aperture and shutter for this fleshy optical-oral device. Images emerge from the darkness, unexpected and intense, a lost moment unearthed and written into another context or double-exposed upon the present. Instead of forming the shapes of words, her lips help capture in a kiss, ingest, then spit out their pictorial record. In this moment I am reminded of the reader, who in accepting the writer's transmissions, recreates for himself, from the building blocks of words and sentence, his own plots, regurgitates, without rule, rewrites, authors - like the ventriloquist, holding up the original text as a dummy, mouthing empty sounds; like the cuckoo, claiming the nest of another in which to hatch her awkwardly ill-fitting eggs.