Hanne Lippard (1984, Milton Keynes, England) is a writer and visual artist working with text in the idioms of concrete poetry and text art, using her own voice as her main medium. She lives and works in Berlin.
Considering the constant move that we are all dealing with in our era, are you on this journey with your own will or is it directed by a silent power?
Growing up in a different country than the one I was born in fed me with an early notion of restlessness. I’m trying hard to make Berlin a point of stability.
How does this move affects creativity?
This intercontinental restlessness is the best recipe for learning languages of all kinds and forms.
What do you compromise for this journey?
I used to think that I lost a lot of people along the way, and would be very sentimental and sad about this ‘loss’, but by now I realise life is a boomerang and usually people, situations, ideas re-occur in your life all the time. It’s what they mean by ‘it’s a small world’.
How can one be there and here at the same time?
Expensive phone calls and inexpensive meditation.
What was the push behind your work Lostisms? What kind of lost are you feeling?
Lostisms is an encyclopaedic soundtrack to all the lostisms one can possibly feel.
‘The lost memory is not accidentally lost. It is lost rather in so far as it belongs to an area of my life which I reject…’ writes Merleau-Ponty in Phenonemmology of Perception (p. 187). To add another layer: memory also expresses itself through language. How would you elucidate the relation between memory and loss?
As I mentioned in the third question, loss is a great part of moving and leaving time behind you. I have always tried, as much as possible for a western human being, to avoid the gathering of physical possessions. Having frequently moved between countries for the past ten years has made this choice easier, if not inevitable. I now realize that this de-possessive mentality also goes for time, memory and places. I used to be a very sentimental person, but during the past years I have tried actively not to be sentimental about the past because it creates too much of a fog around your presence. Berlin is a strange location in that sense, as it heavily resonates a wide spectre of nostalgia from different eras, but at the same time I find that it is also very open-end. Berlin is a bit of a time-warp. However, sometimes I allow myself to indulge in a bit of nostalgia, but almost in the same way you would be careful with eating too much chocolate. You have to stop before you start feeling any notions of nausea.
HANNE LIPPARD – FOWL LANGUAGE
HANNE LIPPARD – LOSTIMS