Silence as Failure, Failure as Toolkit: an articulation of the Anfinn creative research project

I will present the experimental methodologies and philosophies behind this project in the way in which my autistic brain structures knowledge, without interpretation, as a creative performance of nonperformative authenticity.

There are so many barriers between neurodivergent (ND) artists and collaborative spaces.

The in-between or ‘third’ spaces where collaborative connections are most often made are often impossible to navigate, as are project formats relying mainly on ‘face-to-face' verbal interaction. The contributions and innovations of ND people are often lost to creative and research discourses.

My project involves creating an experimental website where ND artists play together to develop creative spaces to exist in: this presentation is about how I’m doing this, starting a neurodivergent creative myco-ecology underneath the neurotypical capitalist academy. It will not be necessary to use neurotypical words or story-systems or semiologies, or words at all. It will not be silence and it will not be separation.

This presentation is also about how I’m doing the project While Being Autistic (academi(mi)cking).

Because of course I am failing.

I am failing to create the rich, full silence I want from out of the poor silence I’m confined within. I am failing to speak in the languages I am trying to escape and I can’t escape them without them. I am failing to write this abstract.

I am sentenced to silence.

So what is the methodology of failure?

This presentation is actually about when I walked an ancient path from the south coast of Ireland to the monastic site called the Rock of Cashel. I divined the parts that had been built over and erased by a kind of unfurling around the omissions to wherever the path should come out, and there it would eventually be. There was and is no way to measure this. When I arrived at the Rock gift shop with my shoes full of blood, absolutely nothing happened. I got the bus home.