Incandescent

'Incandescent' was a participatory live event. We invited participants to assemble in threes to walk around the quadrangle of the Grand Square of the Royal Naval College, now part of Greenwich University, reading Virginia Woolf’s 'A Room of One's Own' out loud each in turn and passing the text within the group. The walking and reading participants wove discretely in and out of the various groups who occupied the Square over the day’s span – tourists, students, workers, even a wedding party. The entire text was read aloud over the course of the day.

In 'A Room of One’s Own' Woolf both looks back in time and (optimistically) imagines a time 100 years in the future. There she imagines that woman’s writing will become untethered from the empirical and psychological impediments of her world to date and that she will have scope to realise the ‘incandescence’ of a Shakespeare: brilliant, androgynous and unobstructed. Woolf’s is a feminist text but the questions it raises around artistic horizons and obstructions resonate well beyond the specific object of her reflections to the questions of power, gender, class and race pertinent to the present moment.

Through the participatory process of the reading, the text became actualised and live in the present moment. 'Incandescent' was a site-specific work insofar as Woolf's 1928 text opens with with the image of the female writer intercepted and excluded from walking on the Oxford grass reserved for the (male) Scholars and Fellows by a uniformed and indignant Oxfordian beadle. In relocating to the institutional site of the Grande Parade at the the Old Naval College at Greenwich University, the act of reading aloud inflected the site and was inflected by it. In 2017, near the projected date of Woolf’s dreamed of future, the text's contemporary relevance within the wider contemporary politics of today made itself felt in an acute and bodily way. Through the collective movement and rhythm of bodies and voices, the event re-actualised the spirit, the profound meaning and the challenge of Woolf’s text within the context of the here and now.

This event was restaged in the same location in October 2018.

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