Published 07 December 2021 in Online News
https://arttimes.co.za/at-feature-unisa-uncanny-stories/
When the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar, we encounter uncanny stories. Making art often includes searching for the tensions between known and unknown, between ordinary existence and intriguing events that write peculiar new stories into our lives. In How to make art at the end of the world, A Manifesto for Research-Creation, Nathalie Loveless (2019:8) writes “I continue to see research-creation as one of those cracks (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen) that lets the light shine in, through its experimental and dissonant forms of practice, research, and pedagogy”. This statement contains the challenge for creative practice to unsettle traditional approaches and disrupt what we take for granted. This characteristic is connected to a history of making strange, as can be found in the concept of the uncanny/Das Unheimliche by Sigmund Freud (1919) and developed by psychoanalysts (Lacan) and feminists (Kristeva). In each of these cases we find an anxiety in real and authentic life, an anxiety not with the unfamiliar, but with the normal.