Saturday 21 January 2012

Tweeting Conversation Slips


By Rachel Lois




In the last days of his life, Franz Kafka could not speak due to tuberculosis of the larynx. He was reduced to communicating to those who were closest to him via short written sentences or ‘hints’, otherwise known as Conversation Slips. Along with the enduring visions his novels have given us - a man who has done nothing wrong fights for his life against a bizarre court that sits in almost every attic in the world (The Trial 1914), a machine quite literally writes condemned people to death (In the Penal Colony 1919), a man tries forever to get into a mysterious castle (The Castle 1922) - are his Conversation Slips... What was Kafka saying and to whom? What paper or pen did he use? What does ‘       Lemonade     it was all so boundless.’ mean? Or rather, favouring the more opaque, WHAT remains of one – sided conversation? HOW the existential aphorism? HOW BIG the slip? Intrigued by all this and more, Rachel Lois has transposed a selection of these slips to Twitter; as 140 character endeavour, research and tribute.


Tweeting Conversation Slips by Rachel Lois Clapham features in #tweetart at Westgate Studios, Wakefield. The work in part relates to the LemonMelon commission ‘      lemonade        everything was so infinite.’

See Tweeting Conversation Slips in situ on Twitter via @rachellois1 and #tweetart 




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