Notes on a Research Proposal de_bruin_mole_et_al

Notes on a Research Proposal

Megen de Bruin-Molé
Amy Brookes

“We discussed which texts had lingered and shaped us while we sat in a café in the park, each feeling like we had stolen ourselves from work, freed from our desks and devices, despite the fact that we sat discussing a research project. I remember mentioning the work of Jane Rendell, Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, and Katherine McKittrick whose work I encountered thanks to you… These works do not include an introduction that details their originality and impact. To engage with them has been to follow a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods. They have taken me somewhere entirely elsewhere, but I have had to work to follow them. I picture their disdain for the slides I am shown in a REF Impact workshop, these strategies to make work appealing to assessors. I imagine them laughing and slipping away between the trees, or at least that is what I want for them, to remain untethered and elusive, free to revel in wild strangeness.”

How do we sustain creative work in the face of burnout, institutional crisis, the end of funding, the mess of life? Like the workshops that it addresses, this article is a deliberate attempt to resist closure. It draws on the ongoing work of our “Speculative Space” project, which uses “SF as a creative practice for engagement and critical reflection within GLAM space”—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This project has comprised a series of workshops oriented around site-specific small acts of collective making. Over the last three years we have gathered in the back rooms of the Winchester Gallery, the Women’s Art Library, the Whitechapel Gallery, Science Museum London, the Museum of English Rural Life, the Natural History Museum, and in the digital institutional spaces of Teams meetings. Each workshop was fragile and fleeting, and the record of the work which lingers in photographs, quotes, and ephemera is only an echo of the true outcome which was in the act of gathering, the trust engendered, and the space created for concerns to be voiced. How then to document this work, and to answer the institutional demands to validate its worth using the metrics of academic research and funding frameworks?

In answer, this article consists of a series of images of scanned and annotated pages which revel in relational complexity. They are layered and non-linear, and while this reflects our ambitions for this work we do not want this form of representation to be an act of exclusion. Embedded within this work is metadata including the original bid and tracked changes as alt text, and image descriptions for each page and the photographs within, in a further digital layering of code and content.

Scroll down to view the images, or click this link to access the accessible version as a Word document.

The black void generated by the photocopier surrounds a series of scanned A4 pages, overlaid with torn fragments of typed text, envelopes replete with toddler doodling, and café napkins. Each scanned page is a gathering of these fragments and a conversation between them. The text of the article is written in a Word document, compressed on the page to make room for copious tracked changes, comments in the margins, and subsequently annotated in pen—words are crossed out, circled, highlighted, while reference annotations and arrows lead from the text to hand written notes which fill all the available blank space of the page. It is a visual reflection of an exuberance of thought which overspills its edges, always impinging and pushing back the sedate black of the photocopier void.<br>The A4 page of the text is taped on to a manilla envelope addressed to one of the authors. The postage is marked as “underpaid” and a child has drawn on the envelope in red felt pen. A torn scrap of typed text is stuck diagonally across the envelope, connecting it to the A4 page, a projection from one site of writing to the other.<br>Image: A piece of black cloth has the word “WORK” printed on it in white. Someone has coloured in the W in red felt pen and affixed ribbon and some calico underneath, onto which they have written “WORK” “WORK” “WORK.”

A scrap of typed text, cut from a page with crimping scissors to leave jagged borders, is affixed to the top of the A4 page, either projecting from it or hanging off its edge.<br>Image: Pages from a book mottled with mildew are gently folded in half so that they retain a curl at the folded edge and are artfully arrayed in a fan. The gentle curves, the pale cream of pages, and the black text makes it appear closer to satin ribbon or lace than paper. While most of the text is illegible two pages have only a single word in large font, which reads “FUCK” “Erasure.”

The A4 page is scanned at an angle and two scraps of text jut out upwards from it. A napkin protrudes from underneath the page, patterned with leaves and text reading “caffé TROPEA” in gold and navy blue.<br>Image: A meeting room with glass cases propped on top of the dado trunking and power sockets, the models within resolutely out of reach. In the foreground someone reaches into a tote bag and their hand emerges grasping the nose of a dolphin skull. The skull seems to be stuck, as if it is simply too strange to manifest into this mundane space without being determinedly drawn forth.

The A4 page of the article is partially overlaid onto another page. The title “Writing Workshops, Hawthorn Archive” is partially visible at the bottom, cut off by the edge of a photocopier which has also left white lines across the text. Where the page is hidden by the A4 of the article the shadow of a margin image can be seen through the paper.<br>Image: White, pink, and peach fabric scraps are bundled together, bound by green, mustard, and neon pink wool which winds tightly around or threads through in running stich with needles still attached at the ends. There are sprigs of lavender and cloth leaves in autumnal tones wound into the bundles, and they all appear flattened, pressed up against the glass of a photocopier, their winding flow momentarily pinned in place.

A scrap of typed paper hangs off the bottom corner of the A4 page, like an afterthought or a comment said just before leaving the room.<br> Image: A person crouches in a doorway, curled over on themselves so that they can look at the paper they hold to the floor. One hand holds a pencil which they are using to create a rubbing of the brass door stop embedded in the floor, while the other is splayed out to hold the paper in place with a spare pencil curled into their palm.

A print out of the “Introduction” page of “Archival Imagination of/for the Future” is arranged underneath the A4 page of the article, the text cut in half but the epigraphs are legible, “to turn the archive into something living…” “and what if there was no past?...”<br>Image: A person dressed all in black stands in a brick back-alley and lifts the lid on a large blue wheely bin. The bin is filled to the brim with cloth bound books, hardcover texts, and glossy magazines. The person’s smile is visible in the tilt of their head, as they lean to read the notice sellotaped to the blue plastic, “This is NOT a bin.”

Another text sits alongside the A4 article page, a pint out from a UKRI funding bid for the project “Salvaging the Future” whose text is barely legible behind the comments in text boxes that proliferate across its surface like pop-up adverts.<br>Image: Bright sunlight casts across a sheet of sugar paper, picking up the edges of dried leaf fragments crumbled across its surface. Pale peach plasticine has been used to shape a small boat with a twig as oars, which sits on the ocean of the paper, adrift on blue swirls drawn onto the surface, the flotsam of the leaves, and a handwritten note saying “all returns to water.”

There are fewer annotations on this page, and so the handwritten notes are free to expand and take up space, to spread across the margin.<br>Image top: A large sheet of paper with curled up edges has a tree drawn onto it in muted green felt pen. The leave of the tree are bits of real dried leaves, each with a small curl of yellow plasticine nestling in the brittle brown fragments. Text written across the page reads “the characters are resting…” Image bottom: Three people stand facing a large black and white image on a wall next to a whiteboard. They are holding up a swag of fabric to fix it in place, from which hangs red cloth leaves, tan calico threaded through with lines of stitching, and a bundle of cloth bound with green wool around a sprig of lavender to echo the form of a figure.

The A4 page is almost empty. Some text has been highlighted and covered over, and one small scrap of text overhangs the edge which reads “formatted: Indent.” One track changes comment remains in the margin under which has been written “Yes! See note above.” In the same handwriting is written “The End?”<br>Image: An orange sheet of paper onto which someone has drawn two serpentine lines, weaving back and forth across the page. The line varies from straight to undulating waves, and is punctuated by spirals which break downwards or dots which speak to a rhythm of making or marking.

Acknowledgements

The original Speculative Space project website can be accessed here: speculativespace.wordpress.com. It includes images and materials from, as well as further reflections on, the workshops.

This publication was supported by the AHRC’s Impact Acceleration Award [University of Southampton and University of Reading IAA accounts 2022-25]; and by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant [grant number SRG25/250355].

It was also supported by our collaborations and engagements with the people whose work and words are included in this piece, most directly Noriko Suzuki-Bosco, Hannah Ishmael, Etta Mae Brookes, Ibtisam Ahmed, Anurita Chandola, Ellis Walker, Frankie Hallam, Tom Dillon, Jessa Mockridge, Verity Burke, Shanique Thompson, Olu Jenzen, Sarah Hayden, Annie Jael Kwan, Angela YT Chan, and anonymous Readers #1 and #2. More traditionally cited are the Salvage Editorial Collective, Evan Calder Williams, Emma Gomis, Avery F. Gordon, Gil Z. Hochberg, Stephen Shaviro, and Jack Halberstam. Many more uncited individuals and groups made this work possible, including the attendees and coordinators of the Speculative Space workshops.