Studies for No

"'Studies for No' pluralizes and hones in on the title of Issy Wood’s 2019 painting “Study for No,” and first solo exhibition in France of the same name. Wood’s painting adorns the word NO with ornamental details, bejewelling the imperative to negate. Studies for No presents a program of performative readings as a collective study of negation, absence and rupture. Working with and in language, postures, and forms structured by and as mediation, alienation, contradiction, and abstraction, the works turn against the symptomatic acting out of power as accumulation. The enemy is confronted with the sociality of a no that is impossible except through study." – Marija Cetinić.

The evening of performative readings was hosted by Marija Cetinić at Stichting Perdu in January 2025. The performative reading was the first public moment in which part of my ongoing writing project and thesis was shared. The text, entitled a ghostly echo, sonorous ululation, intimately recounts a chance encounter with a letter my grandmother left her daughter–my mother–prior to her death. The larger writing project and thesis is a combined exploration of the mystical nature of chance, black subjectivity, hauntology, and the generative register of spectrality/ghosts.

* Excerpts of this performative reading would go on to be published in Issue Three of Sticky Fingers' GROM Journal.