Ex-Trauma: The Opposite of the Traumatic, the second volume of the Experiments and Intensities series, asks what, for contemporary post-industrial, post-Freudian societies, is an challenging question. Beyond the trite pronouncements of the New Age, is there such a thing as an event, or a human experience, that has the power of the traumatic over the psyche and body, but that does the opposite? What it to un- (rather than de-)traumatize, to have an effect as powerful as the traumatic but one which is – well – positive, for lack of a better term? Can we, as artists, even imagine the precise qualities of such events? The video contributions here – sometimes works for video, sometimes documentation, sometimes audiovisual essay – all explore, albeit imperfectly, the edges of this impossibly utopian question.

Table of Contents

Curatorial-Editorial Statement and Introduction
•Yvon Bonenfant
The second volume of Experiments and Intensities takes us on a journey through and around an impossibly utopian notion – a sort of opposite of the experience of the traumatic, which we’re calling ‘ex-trauma’. We’re seeking not the expression of, or recovery from, trauma – though these themes certainly come up – but rather, we wonder whether the traumatic has an inverse, and if so, whether artists can help us identify it.
video artwork
The Sonification of Morecambe Bay
An audiovisual work • artist: Neil Boynton- writing

The Sonification of Morecambe Bay
The Sonification of Morecambe Bay
An audiovisual work • artist: Neil BoyntonNeil Boynton
The Sonification of Morecambe Bay is a video about observation; about how, using time-lapse photography, durational events in the environment can be brought within the limits of our perception. Weather data captured concurrently with the images control elements of the soundtrack. An altered and heightened engagement with time and landscape.
video artwork
Winter Garden
A performance for video • artist: Essi Kausalainen- writing

Winter Garden
Winter Garden
A performance for video • artist: Essi KausalainenEssi Kausalainen
Winter Garden is a performance made for the camera. It was filmed in a winter day on ice, near the city of Kuopio, Finland. Conjoining beauty and horror, strength and fragility, the tropical and the Arctic co-exist, and the tension between ‘striving for’ and ‘striving against’ is set in stark relief as blooms freeze.
video artwork
Undeleted: Emails from the Weyburn Project
A work in video • artist: Kathleen Irwin, using anonymised communication from the public- writing

Undeleted: Emails from The Weyburn Project
Undeleted: Emails from the Weyburn Project
A work in video • artist: Kathleen Irwin, using anonymised communication from the publicKathleen Irwin
After acting as producer, co-maker and scenographer on a site-derived performance work in an abandoned mental hospital, Irwin received a number of emails that problematized its history, and shed light on human engagement with this site – a site interwoven with so many intimate narratives that explore the space between mental health, the ‘state’, authority and the personal. After time moves on, after ‘healing’, if it comes, what might be next?
video artwork
Candy Darling (excerpt)
Excerpt from Candy Darling • full crediting details are at www.candydarling.be- writing

Candy Darling (excerpt)
Candy Darling (excerpt)
Excerpt from Candy Darling • full crediting details are at www.candydarling.beSilvia Defrance
This excerpt from Defrance’s short feature Candy Darling takes inside part of the psychological world that Steve Shagollan of Variety magazine called a Freudian Alice in Wonderland for adults with an ominous landscape. Its quirkiness and idiosyncratic vision move beyond received narratives of sex, trauma and consequences to ask visual questions about the nature of what remains in our psyches, our mirrors, our bathroom sinks and on our hands after encounter and survival.
video artwork
Sounds & Visions: Dreaming the Silence as an Un-trance-lated Performance
An audiovisual essay • artists: Helen Newall and Karen Lauke- writing

Sounds & Visions: Dreaming the Silence as an Un-trance-lated Performance
Sounds & Visions: Dreaming the Silence as an Un-trance-lated Performance
An audiovisual essay • artists: Helen Newall and Karen LaukeHelen Newall & Karen Lauke
This short video essay is a hybrid form fusing critical and creative heuristic responses to hearing loss and tinnitus. The sounds are created out of a palette of described tinnitus noise; the visions are representative of synaesthetic response to sound, and the text charts a journey through all of these, throwing up interesting psychophysical and aesthetic questions about ‘ideal’ life experience.
video artwork
Scenes in a Mirror (Extract)
A collaborative work of videodance • Bill Hopkinson (director), with Laura Haughey (performer-creator) and Alan Martin (performer-creator)- writing

Scenes in a Mirror (extract)
Scenes in a Mirror (Extract)
A collaborative work of videodance • Bill Hopkinson (director), with Laura Haughey (performer-creator) and Alan Martin (performer-creator)Bill Hopkinson, Laura Haughey & Alan Martin
This short dance theatre film stages fracture and reconciliation in relationship. Exploring representations of ability and disability, it is an experiment in integrated practice and equal collaboration, where the dancers choreographed and operated the cameras. It challenges us to think differently about ability, relationship and pleasure.
video artwork
The Opposite of Trauma (The Skin Walks)
Documentation of performance for public space • Yvon Bonenfant (artistic director) and the Galloping Cuckoos (performers)- writing

The Opposite of Trauma (The Skin Walks)
The Opposite of Trauma (The Skin Walks)
Documentation of performance for public space • Yvon Bonenfant (artistic director) and the Galloping Cuckoos (performers)Yvon Bonenfant
Bonenfant directed a process during which the ensemble Galloping Cuckoos explored a range of skin sensations associated with attempted ex-traumatic states and then translated these into postures and ‘walks’. These were then walked through three cities: Paris, London and Cardiff, suggesting other ways of somatic being to passersby, sometimes almost invisibly.
video artwork
Making Glass; Glass
A video essay and video art • Kayla Parker (artist, performer, animator), Stuart Moore (camera and edit on Making Glass, sound on Glass), Sundog Media (Producer)- writing

Making Glass; Glass
Making Glass; Glass
A video essay and video art • Kayla Parker (artist, performer, animator), Stuart Moore (camera and edit on Making Glass, sound on Glass), Sundog Media (Producer)Kayla Parker & Stuart Moore
In this practice-led exploration of modalities of écriture féminine, I map the shifting subjectivities generated by Glass, a stop-motion animation that performs femininity through close examination and play with glass fragments found among the briny debris of an urban beach.
video artwork
Room with a View
A video essay and video art • by Iris Garrelfs with responses by Harold Offey- writing

Room with a View (abridged version)
Room with a View
A video essay and video art • by Iris Garrelfs with responses by Harold OffeyIris Garrelfs
Room With A View is a kind of film made by Iris Garrelfs as part of an Urbania Collective residency at Park-a-moor in the Lake District, 2008. Made possible by Grizedale Art, with Harold Offeh responding to internal and external spaces. A whimsical meditation on expansive vision and the interplay between inner and outer spaces, where a prosaic compost toilet gives an in to the quiet small experiences that surround and suffuse us.
video artwork
Year of the Rat - Dripping (Short)
A performance for and with video • by Annette Arlander- writing

Year of the Rat - Dripping (Short)
Year of the Rat - Dripping (Short)
A performance for and with video • by Annette ArlanderAnnette Arlander
In Arlander’s words: With a lilac scarf on my shoulders I stand in the sea, take water in a jar, and pour it back to the sea on the northern shore of Harakka Island, Helsinki, approximately once a week before sunset between 26th January 2008 and 24th January 2009 during the Chinese year of the rat.