Gina Prat Lilly
About
Gina Prat Lilly (she/they) writes through theory, haptics, and translation. They write essays located at the intersection of poetry, queer and feminist critical theory, visual art and philosophy. Their writing has been commissioned by Sticky Fingers Publishing and Visual AIDS (New York); has been published by Synoptique: Journal of Moving Image Studies, TACO!, New Voices Peer to Peer; and is forthcoming in a special issue of Classical Antiquities on Anne Carson, published by University of California Press. She is currently foraying into noise via her practice playing the saxophone with electronic music collective GATE.
At the Royal College of Art, Gina was part of the editorial team for An Engine for Thinking, a collaboration between the Warburg Institute and MA Writing cohort, and coordinated readings and performances for the launch event.
Alongside other students, they co-founded the translation research group please enter with heart open and hands out for what we have to give, holding a series of collaborative translation workshops and culminating in a published pamphlet series.
Before studying at the Royal College of Art, Gina majored in Classical and Hellenic Studies at King's College London, and was awarded the Katie Lentakis prize by the Anglo-Hellenic League for their thesis on the myth of Antigone in post-war Spain.
Gina is passionate about access to arts and culture, and to this end facilitates creative writing workshops for older adults. They also work as an Editorial Assistant at FIELDNOTES.
Statement
Push your shoulder up against language and it will push back against you. If a body has the language of gesture, then language, too, gestures to us from a body. This body is neither wholly naive. Nor is it wholly ungodly.
I am interested in touching language and in language that touches. Not the object, but the hand embroiled in its delivery. At times biting the hand that feeds. I write as though to rummage among a pile of ashes and find the bones of some small animal. To fondle these bones and see where they have cracked. I like to watch butter melt in a pan, as meanings once whole or proximate ooze and drift apart. I am interested in knowledge: its production, its dissolution and its texture. Like casting salt into the word and watching its flames flicker blue.
This is a commentary on the unfinished work Imitació del foc: An Ardent Translation
This is a project that goes careening and crashing through the undergrowth of language with nothing but the fallible tools of translation, and comes out torn, battered, and confused. Imitació del foc: An Ardent Translation makes clear its conceptual and formal ambitions from the outset. It is to be a strange mixture of translation, memoir, a poet’s biography, the 20th century history of Spain, and a meditation on languages and making meaning. The project’s fragments pull the project in all these varied directions. And this, of course, is where the trouble begins.
My thesis offers, on one level, a set of translated poems, various forms of writing about the poet, Catalan communist poet Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel, accompanied by short essays offering ways into the poetry and on the act of translation. This body of work is in turn treated as a found document, introduced by a framing essay commenting on the ambiguities and failures of the main text and, more widely, of biography and of translation. In providing these varied forms sliding over one another to make up an ultimately unfinished and unfinishable project, this project is an exercise in writing with and on the bias. Unstable, fragmentary, and rarely reliable, I hope to visibilise the complexity of approximating an object of study.
Crumminess
Crumminess was commissioned by Sticky Fingers Publishing in 2021 as part of their Dead Lovers series, which focuses on a particular work of a deceased writer. This essay was written in response to Cookie Mueller's story The Simplest Thing. The publication also includes texts by Rose Higham-Stainton and Zoë Frost.
"An attempt at haptic criticism, a descent into affect, Gina Prat Lilly’s essay on Crumminess takes Molly’s sunburnt flesh and enters the logic of blistering to unfetter the body. Under a hallucinatory sun, the skin is undone, matter turns to matter, and we are poised toward that which lies on the other side of the lake: a disorderly, dissenting and dirty queer ecology."
- "Introduction," Sophie Paul and Kaiya Waerea.
Myth-Making and Shaking: the Subversive Art of David Cannon Dashiell
Poikilos
Triangulating desire, mythos and etymology, "Poikilos" is a work of fleshy ekphrasis, taking seven steps into the lithograph of a cystic liver.
"Poikilos" was part of An Engine for Thinking, a collaboration between the MA Writing cohort and The Warburg Institute.
"In An Engine for Thinking, we dig our hands into the archive to find alluring objects, precise diagrams, oddities, facts, fictions and carefully held stories. At the Warburg Institute, we spend time among open stacks and in cabinet drawers, yes, but oh! we also linger in the entrance, the elevator, the hallways. In the intimacy of these recondite corners, we chance upon novel strands of history, methodology and thought. We tug at these strands in the hopes that something might unravel and find, suddenly and devastatingly, to be unravelled ourselves. We pull apart and are pulled apart by, among other delights, Touch, Cheating, Animals, Repetition, Dazzle and Mistresses."
- "Introduction," MA Writing
II.
The prefix hepa-, used to describe elements in relation to the liver such as hepatitis and hepatology, is derived from the Ancient Greek term ήπαρ (hepar), otherwhere spelled ήδαρ (hedar).
The ancient conception of the liver as the seat of the soul and its passions casts loose semantic loops between hepatics and ἡδονή (hedone), that tangled etymological origin that denotes a surrender to pleasure.
Let me gather these loops. Let me speak of beauty.
III.
A poor, uninteresting, slate-coloured scrap of healthy liver remains at the top-left, but it is easily ignored and looks like it will soon submit to a despoliation of its own making.
The morbid anatomy is bloated, turgid, distended. Bent on a supra-generative task.
Hues of oyster blue and dust vivify the flesh. A necrotic pallor is not necessarily white, and its tones appear spectrally indecisive, difficult to place on a chromatic spectrum. Colour briefly discerns ovoid, pinched and vermiform guises, only to pitch them again into amorphousness.
Boundaries are intimated here and there, but never clearly limned.
The mass struggles with its own containment. How to rein it in when one’s reigning characteristic is to proliferate?
IV.
Somewhere in its contours, a pearl grapples with its own indeterminacy. This is the untold tension of the seemingly virtuous pearl. Lustre betrays limits, disquiets boundaries.
Shimmer hints at a surface by finding, striking and illuminating an edge.
Yet, the very instance of shedding light contains, too, a dazzling confusion. A puzzling of the surface.
At the edges, the liver’s cells are devoted to a perpetual auto-bissection, dissolution, reconfiguration. The lithograph portrays the cytokinesis in a flecked pointillism, a testament to this perennial becoming.
The infected hepatic amassment glistens.
V.
That which was once apparent and carried on the sleeve can no longer be observed by the eye. It is unstable, manifold, elusive. The gleam subsumes the surface.
The liver shifts, quivers. Movement is a kind of opacity, since a kinetic object cannot be stilled and examined.
The shimmering surface refuses apprehension, perception. There is unknowability, an epistemological instability. Here, the surface tension of iridescence deflects cognitive attention.
VI.
Let me consider beauty, like the intrusion of a grain of sand into an oyster’s shell.
Let me consider intrusion, the cystic kind that makes one lose one’s head.
Let me consider pleasure, like the attack of an eagle on what could be, by now, your best loved viscera.
Read "Poikilos" in full and peruse An Engine for Thinking.
Slanted Translations: An Interview with Rosanna Bruno
In this interview-essay, I spoke with artist Rosanna Bruno, collaborator of Anne Carson on The Trojan Women: A Comic (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), about her practice as an illustrator. Bruno’s illustrations offer the reader an oblique entry into a devastated Troy: they are translation "at a slant". This interview thinks about how Bruno’s illustrative abstraction and figuration of the various elements of the Ancient Greek tragedy as act as an extension of translation’s problem and delightful potential. I was interested in the use of humour and the comic book form to counterpoint the tragedy and broaden its accessibility, all while extending, magnifying and retuning its poignancy.
This piece is forthcoming in Anne Carson's Euripides: Takes on H of H Playbook and The Trojan Women, Classical Antiquity, vol. 42 iss. 2, University of California Press (2023).
