Artes Mundi 11 × Testun testun beside/gerllaw

beside/gerllaw is a series of texts specially produced for Artes Mundi 11 with Testun testun, a new independent platform fostering expanded art/writing practices in Wales. This seven-part series grounds the work of the AM11 artists within some of the ecologies, politics and histories of this part of the world – and its deep-rooted networks of critically engaged practice. Each contributor builds associations between their own research and experience and motifs or thematics present in one AM11 artist’s work, with a particular sensitivity to embodiment and sitedness. Their texts rehearse Testun testun’s aspiration to create spaces for experimentation with forms which are both intimate and dialogic, precise and roamingly associative, speculative and materially rooted. “Beside the great annals of history,” Becca Voelcker writes in beside/gerllaw’s opening text, riffing on the work of Sancintya Mohini Simpson, “are oral accounts, whispers, plots.” The notion of a writing which “whispers” resonates vividly across the series: which speaks to both the generative potential of personal recollection and inter/personal encounter, and which “plots” to undo the repressive systems and hierarchies which we have inherited, and in which we are all implicated.Testun testun’s programmes are convened by artist-writer (and AM10 journal editor) Dylan Huw, with an always-expanding network of collaborators.