MLitt Art Writing School of Fine Art
Leah Sinforiani
As writer, researcher and visual artist, I work with hybrid prose and sculpture to engage the personal, the speculative fictive and the political in wry surreal ways. I am interested in exploring the intergalactic motorways that intersect class, gender, and wired histories in a time of inclining poverty in Glasgow.
The writing is united by themes of not wanting to be part of reality, needing to be, and in turn finding humorous ways to cope with this. My voice in these texts utlises the perils of the sardonic register, adopting postmodern irony to flirt with the disastrous realities of past and present cost of living crisis’ in the city. I am interested in unsolid immigrant narratives and how we can use art writing to solidy these histories that are often unwritten in innovative and interactive ways.
THIS IS A GRAND SPACE TALE
BIG RED CAT MAP
Big Red Cat Map is an interactive poetry map created as a spin-off of a publication called BIG RED CAT ZINE, a no budget, non-hierarchical literary zine in Glasgow. We started a campaign called ‘FOLLOW THE BIG RED CAT’ where we stuck stickers of the logo cat, gave him a ‘weird tone of voice’ (examples here:@BIGREDCATZINE) and put it in different places in an attempt to reach more people to submit. This creative publication acts as a way of following the places the cat goes to relax or ‘WHAT THE BIG RED CAT DOES ON HIS DAY OFF’, as a disheartened ANTI-CATAPLIST persona, burnt out by the current state of the world. The map can be opened and barcodes scanned, taking you to an online map of the places you can REST AS RESISTANCE.
HOW TO LOOK AFTER THE BUGS IN YOUR BED
How to Look After the Bugs in Your Bed is a poetry performance piece which debuted at Art Writings’ Soft Shell Event. Two poems in this collection were selected by the Scottish Poetry Library for the Scottish Next Generation Young Makar Prize and can be read in the Yellow Paper. The work features a chronic pessimism about the cost of living crisis and the inability to get rid of the bugs as pests, yet also feeling like a bug, as social and economic pressures squash Everything Else.
THIS IS A GRAND SPACE TALE
My novella, This is a Grand Space Tale, attempts to chronicle the intergalactic motorways that intersect class, gender, and wired histories in a time of inclining poverty in Glasgow or Air Strip 2, through the mouthpiece of a bitter, unnamed narrator who is just trying to write a Space Odyssey in the back corner of a pub in the city centre. Some omissions have been made to this book [see pg. 3, 42, 65] at the request of those who do not want to be associated with a work of speculative historical contemporary auto-theoretical fiction due to a surplus of adjectives and a host of other reasons that could not be aptly compressed in this way.
This text is complemented by a wire map of the places mentioned inside. The author doesn’t recommend looking at it for too long. It does not command the limelight like a Space
O d y s s e y ←This, you will find in the back pages of the book when flipped upside down. This disturbance of the text acts in an appended, artificial manner like all the space adjectives do in the book, in order to underscore the farcical nature of the enterprise of writing a Space Odyssey in the current climate, in such dire circumstances.
This is a Grand Space Tale and all its inner/ outer/ frontal matter are a burlesque of the sci-fi genre more generally. In an attempt to use postmodern irony to ‘flirt with disaster’, humour and the ‘perils of the sardonic register’ as ‘criticism of human behaviour’, the narrator takes on the role of a contemptuous, omnipresent critic as a ‘coping mechanism’ (p19). They (their gender is never explicitly defined in the text) use this as a way of dealing with unseemly characters and an unseemly time period transforming a pub, the customers, a missing ‘you’, the surrounding area and themselves into an imagined comic dystopian space (p19). For an additional insight see the: INTERGALACTIC INDEX on pg 73.
