“There’s never any innocence in the processes of remembering and forgetting.” The art of reframing and rephrasing, discursively creating and conveniently forgetting, the misconstrued, the black holes, the blind spots: ‘Alternative facts’ have always been present in the making of our histories, nations, self-storytelling and -imaging. Against the backdrop of Iceland’s aptly dubbed ‘Cultural Crash’, upon the banks collapsing in 2008, ‘We always need heroes’ surveys the contemporary state of our narrative landscapes: natural, national, political.

I would like to propose a film screening of ‘We always need heroes’ (43 min), followed by a talk presenting the project’s eponymous artist book, and questions and discussion with the audience.

‘We always need heroes’ calls into question the construction, reliability and authorship of our narratives. A multi-vocal complex of perspectives, in which interchanging voices complete one another’s sentences, punctuate and perforate their meanings, derail directions – and put forth an embodied aesthetic for listening.

Historians, folklorists, philosophers and fishermen recount in snippets their (broken) national narrative: the creation of ‘Golden Ages’, the making of myths, heroes, leaders, and superiority complexes. As curator Lucy Cotter writes: “We are invited to sit in the psychological aftermath of the crash, sifting through the emotional and political debris together – not as strangers, but as fellow human beings navigating the fragility of our own narratives.”

Both my research process and its outcomes embrace different practices of listening. Following the screening I propose to address these various practices throughout my methodology, and the modes of listening brought forth both through the works’ form (its tight weave simultaneously emphasises its gaps) and motioned in its content: an embodied aesthetic for listening.

Click here to view the remains of this cancelled presentation on Research Catalogue