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Becca Voelcker
Artes Mundi 11 × Testun testun beside/gerllawThe page becomes the plot [to Sancintya Mohini Simpson]
Sancintya Mohini Simpson, kūlī / karambu 2020-2021, 15 panels, watercolour and gouache on handmade wasli paper, 88 x 63cm (irreg.) each panel. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Image by Carl Warner.
Overview
The opening text of beside/gerllaw takes the form of a letter addressed to who is showing work in Chapter, Cardiff as part of Artes Mundi 11. Becca Voelcker builds on her workshop format rooted in epistolary writing, and broader research on women’s labour and land-based practice, to meditate around the centrality in Simpson’s work of building narratives which run counter to the logics of colonial archives. Departing from Wales’ coastal and mountainous north-west, this deeply evocative essay provokes rich questions on the myriad definitions and possibilities of “archiving,” on rural modernity, and on how we build structures for holding ideas even as we cannot sense them yet.
Authors
Becca Voelcker
Becca Voelcker is a writer and historian of visual culture from Pant Glas, Gwynedd. Her book Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction – acclaimed as “a groundbreaking account of global film cultures rooted in land-based struggle” – is forthcoming from University of California Press, accompanied by a film programme by the same name at the Barican Centre in November 2025. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.Read more
Files
More from Artes Mundi 11 × Testun testun beside/gerllaw
Llifolygon [after Jumana Emil Abboud]
Sweet Songs Never Last [alongside Sawangwongse Yawnghwe]
Magic Banjo [resounding Anawana Haloba]
Serpentine (a weaving) [following Antonio Paucar]
VENERATION of ORDINARY MYSTERIES [echoing Kameelah Janan Rasheed]
