# Charlotte Prodger The 19th-century diary, shaped by the Age of Enlightenment and Sentimentalism, employed psychological introspection as a means of moral self-improvement and emotional expression. Romantic diarists in the early 19th century were influenced by a new historicist sense of subjectivity. By the latter half of the century, the rise of positivism saw the diary being used as a tool for scientific self-observation, tracing connections between psychological states, external circumstances, and sensory experiences. In the 20th century, diaristic practices in art absorbed diverse interpretations of subjectivity, focusing on deliberate self-construction within aesthetic or political frameworks. For Jonas Mekas, the diaristic sentiment oscillates between vivid spiritual subjectivity and the material editing processes of film, embracing contradictory dimensions. His work resists precise categorisation or definition; at times, it is aligned with _live art_ or performance art processes rather than recorded media per se. At other times, as seen in his collections of footage, his practice transcends mere archival accumulation, instead requiring the rearrangement and reconfiguration of recorded images and fragments. Through this approach, Mekas is not represented as a singular, internalised voice but as an 'othered self', interacting with historical records. His filmed presence expands into an 'other-I', where past and present overlap. This diaristic or autobiographical practice takes form of search of, according to Denis Hollier's account, a shadow in pictorial space, "an index that makes the work lose all virtuality, "that forever disturbs the calm of the image, the solidity of the object" [@hollier_surrealist_1994, 124]. By connecting the visual art of the 1920s surrealism with a contemporary forms of diaristic literature, he brings particular forms of practices that brings the indirect indication of the object, the enunciation of the subjectivity. He exemplifies especially André Breton's *Nadja* (1928) and his argument on the function of the photography as indexation of the tale, "from the descriptive realism" to a performative utterance, the revelation through the act of making. This indexical expansion echoes his assertion in his later text: "A filing system is indefinitely expandable, rhizomatic [...] its interior mobility allows for permanent reordering" [@hollier_notes_2005, 39], emphasising the fluid nature of indexation using notes within diaristic practices, explaining that this quality enables a non-linear and open-ended form of self-narration in Michel Leiris and Roland Barthes's writings that embraced an unfinished form of autobiography, presenting the self not as a fixed figure but as an ongoing, ever-evolving process. By engaging with the methodologies of Michel Leiris and Roland Barthes, Denis Hollier's _"Notes (On the Index Card)"_ [-@hollier_notes_2005] critically examines the interplay between autobiographical narrative and literary experimentation, illuminating the role of index cards within their creative practices. Leiris, shaped by the influences of surrealism and existentialism, foregrounded personal expression in his autobiographical writing. In contrast, Barthes, situated within the intellectual frameworks of structuralism and post-structuralism, adopted a more theoretical and detached mode of writing. However, in his later works, Barthes began to integrate autobiographical elements with increasing prominence, creating a convergence with Leiris’s approach to self-representation. Hollier emphasises that, within their note or index card methodologies, the self becomes a process constructed through the interaction of documenting and memory, serving as a critical tool of literary experimentation that "resists the syntagmatic closure of the sentence by embodying the openness of the paradigm" [@hollier_notes_2005, 40]. Through this expandable and rhizomatic structure, it "allows for permanent reordering" [@hollier_notes_2005, 40]. Leiris employed index cards to systematically organise fragmented memories and materials, drawing inspiration from Duchamp's *The Green Box*, which he described as an autobiography akin to a "(definitively-and unfinishingly—unfinished) strip tease." This metaphor underscores his conceptualisation of the self as a process of perpetual reconstruction. In contrast, Barthes utilised index cards to construct non-linear and fluid narratives, presenting the self through indirect dialogue with the "other"—the recorded past self. For Barthes, diaristic narration did not serve as a vehicle for "direct self-expression" but rather as a means of exploring the **othered self**. Barthes’s understanding of the self was deeply influenced by Roman Jakobson's theory of shifters—deictic pronouns such as "I" and "you," which lack fixed referents and whose meaning shifts depending on context. Within this framework, Barthes conceptualised the self ("I") as inherently unstable and context-dependent, rejecting any notion of the self as a fixed or immutable entity. Through these observations and analyses, Hollier contends that the note or index card method, facilitated by the flexible structure of the "box," enables the perpetual rearrangement of narratives and embodies the "aesthetics of the unfinished." This process, paradoxically, conveys both the aspiration for self-realisation and its inherent impossibility. Rather than romanticising the artist’s personal life or reducing the writer or artist to a functional role, it raises an aesthetic question about the demands placed on subjectivity within the cultural spheres we inhabit. By transgressing its own boundaries, this approach exerts a profound influence on broader aesthetic and cultural practices. ### [[Moyra Davey]] ![[Moyra Davey]] Charlotte Prodger 작업에서 영상을 통해 이러한 주관성의 유동성은 극대화된다. 그녀의 작업 속에서 그녀의 시선은 먼 곳을 바라보지만 신체는 무엇인가에 의해 끊임 없이 프레임 공간을 떠돈다. Charlotte Prodger의 작업들, 특히 **BRIDGIT (2016)**: 스코틀랜드 시골 풍경과 선사 시대의 선돌을 중심으로, 퀴어 정체성과 과거의 연결을 탐구, **SaF05 (2019)**: 보츠와나의 암사자 SaF05를 통해 젠더와 동물 행동의 경계에서 정체성을 조명, **Stoneymollan Trail (2015)**: 개인적 경험과 공공 및 사적 공간 간의 관계를 Autobiographical Accumulation을 통해 공간적 매트릭스로 재구성하며 이를 통해 아티스트의 Queer Wilderness가 발전되어가는 모습을 관찰한다. In the same sense, 그녀의 작업은 공간적으로도 subjectivity로도 두 가지 정 반대의 방향으로 동시에 나아간다. 자전적 요소들의 축적과 여러 오디오-비주얼의 자료들은 그녀의 개인적 경험, 기억, 장소, 텍스트, 이미지 등을 체계적으로 수집하고 조직하여 다층적이고 변형 가능한 독특한 형태의 자아 영역성(territoriality)을 형성한다. "Prodger’s videos seem to move from location to location, jumping huge distances across space and time, scrambling the certainties of fixed coordinates" [@cuthbertson_behaviour_2021, 13] Personal voiceovers are used to explore landscapes in a more specific manner, reflecting on self-determination in both bodies and geography." 이를 통해서 그는 자아의 공간을 영역으로 연결하는데 이는 she is "a matrix to put these seemingly disparate fragments of text and spoken narrative into dialogue." 이를 통해 그녀는 단순히 자신의 이야기를 기록하는 것을 넘어, 다수의 요소를 결합하여 geography of selfness and subjectivity의 **변화성과 분산성**을 탐구합니다. As Tuan Yi-Fu argues the geography is also “an enquiry into nature and culture, the transition from living close to nature to living in an artifactual world, and, in the case of the individual, from biological being to cultural being.” [@tuan_romantic_2013, 147], 그녀의 작업은 간접적인 그녀 자신의 피부를 한겹 한겹 쌓아가고 이러한, as Alisa Lebow recognises that the multi-layered self is not simply transformed into a filmic text, but through a course of self-negotiation. 이러한 complexity of mutable self, 혹은 *plural self* as Alisa S. Lebow identifies, is: > a constructed, culturally inscribed, fragmentary, and incomplete narrative that is neither the sole invention of an ideologically autonomous author, nor the collectively overdetermined product of a *monolithic* culture, but rather is some admixture of these two impossible positions, made even more impossible by the fact that the cultural context is highly heterogeneous and always at some measure of remove. [@lebow_first_2008, xvi, italic original]. Lebow의 *plural self* 는 with the question of "Jewishness" in relation to Jewish identity and cultural production, points out the multifaceted set of relations to a larger collectivity. Charlotte Prodger 의 작업은 이러한 여러 방식의 subjectivity 의 set of relation을 공간과 이야기들의 구성을 통해서 강화하는데 Erika Balsom [-@balsom_openings_2018] points out Stoneymollan Trail (2015)에서 아티스트 작업에서 보이는 tension을 발견할 수 있으며 이는 The immediacy of individual experience, particularly as it concerns queer life beyond the metropolis, jostles with the effects and affects of technological capture, which at once distances and preserves” (Balsom, 2018, p. 3). Stoneymollan Trail (2015) "takes its title from an old path in Scotland once used to transport the dead to the nearest consecrated land. In the video, Prodger blends personal and media history, combining scenes from MiniDV tapes she shot between 1998 and 2014 with HD and iPhone video” [-@balsom_openings_2018]. A particularly compelling aspect of _Stoneymollan Trail_ (2015) lies in its fragmented sense of distance. Early in the film, her camera, directed toward a fox, captures the breakdown of pixels through a zoomed-in view. This gaze shifts through a zoom-out, situating the fox within its wider surroundings, and mid-shot further zooms out, connecting the fox’s location to a broader spatial context. The reconstruction of space through these zoom-ins and zoom-outs recurs throughout the work, establishing a dual quality of simultaneously maintaining and creating distance. Moreover, she interweaves the streets of Glasgow with anonymous locations she inhabited, revealing the interplay between personal experience and spatial context. In this process, she incorporates excerpts from sci-fi writer Samuel Delany’s texts, creating a dialogue between private experiences and external textual references. Through this, the spatial grid continually moves into the frame while simultaneously dispersing and expanding outward. > And if you're filming in a landscape, and the wind is pushing the tiny microphone to its limit, like ripping it, and if you try and do a static shot, you see your body breathing. The systems of the body are enmeshed with the camera. It's a kind of symbiosis, but also a kind of grappling. I like that. I feel very cautious about the term landscape as one thing, like a homogeneous, romantic blob, like a forest or a mountain, as opposed to cities which are generally more individuated. People see a shot of a city in a film, I feel like often there's an impulse to try to identify that space. [@prodger_charlotte_2018]. Erika Balsom [-@balsom_openings_2018] 은 Prodger의 작업을 "BRIDGIT navigates this uncertain passage, poetically and patiently tracing how we are made and unmade, how we make and unmake ourselves.” [@balsom_openings_2018] 으로 설명한다. > In a form of personal filmmaking that seeks not to reinforce the ‘stability or legibility’ of the self, but rather to bring out its mutability and ‘dispersal’, emphasizing how it is continually shaped from within and without, Prodger traces how, as Balsom writes, ‘we are made and unmade, how we make and unmake ourselves’ (2018: 214). > "In the monumental standing stones of Bridgit’s epoch, Prodger locates an enduring presence that never yields to total comprehension. Mythic and material, these icons of permanence have seen their meanings mutate over time, with the motivations for their creation and location remaining a matter of speculation" [@balsom_openings_2018]. Her method of collecting materials is deeply personal yet simultaneously distant, drawing from disparate images. She combines sounds of music heard from somewhere, gazes directed toward far-off places, personal experiences, literature, science, and popular culture to construct a complex narrative. In *BRIDGIT* (2016), spatiality develops in a slightly different direction, where her narratives—within and beyond the frame—become more deeply intertwined. Through remembered interactions with others and "from private spaces and the wilds of Scotland with personal stories" [@balsom_openings_2018], she constructs what could be described as portrait-territories of her life. Connecting personal experiences with historical contexts, the work incorporates voiceover narrations of her teenage experiences, such as coming out in a rural setting and instances where her gender identity was misunderstood by strangers. She further integrates mythical dimensions into her work, drawing inspiration from Julian Cope’s guidebooks and the pioneering transgender studies of Sandy Stone. Narration includes references to various place names and ancient religious symbols, weaving them into her storytelling. Throughout this process, she emphasises the role and function of the camera she used her phone filmed over a year, which "making the phone a material and almost sculptural object and is her most autobiographical work. The phone's capabilities, such as flipping it mid-shot and capturing the user's fingers and breath, are highlighted as integral to the filmmaking process" [@prodger_charlotte_2018]. Through this approach, she creates a communicative matrix of vertical dialogue, bridging the ancient and her contemporary, personal experiences and collective histories, while maintaining a sense of interiority. > I think about grids a lot, particularly in relation to coordinates. So grids are used to map things, but in the end, grids are always infinite. What we can’t see of them extends infinitely beyond the edges of the frame. And to me that feels very vast, like a lot of the empty landscapes I’m drawn to in my work. [@prodger_charlotte_2020, n.pag.] Her gaze fixes on something in motion—her own body, the forest floor, a passing train, and a moving ship—yet flows through space. This perspective approaches spatial territorialisation not as boundary-keeping but as an exploration of **symbiosis and exchange**, expanding the relationship between self and non-self. By juxtaposing multiple spaces, Prodger portrays the self not as a static concept but as a dynamic, interactive entity. Her body is only indirectly visible, glimpsed through the movement of the camera held in her shaky hands. Various voices and sounds connect transitions between distinct spaces, dismantling **whereness** and fostering a multilayered dialogue. Fixed bodies within the geography move fluidly, a theme that transitions from modes of transportation to her body in _SaF05_ (2019) and it deepen the density of space within her visual language. This dialogue exists somewhere yet remains outside the frame. As in her earlier works, where she layered herself—through traces, camera movement, and fingers entering the frame—here too, the lioness’s traces and her appearance through surveillance cameras or smoke from outside of the frame build layered spatialities on her cinematic frame. Her feet drive continuous spatial shifts, while the lioness’s movements, combined with accelerated shot and zoom changes, amplify the fragmentation of space. The frame blurs the distinction between floor and wall, or whether her gaze is directed downward or forward. Textures briefly settle before transforming again, with raindrop traces hinting that her gaze is momentarily directed downward. ## References