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Fusing self-representation with philosophy and critical theory, autotheory moves between "theory" and "practice." It is critical and it is creative; it is experiential and experimental; it is scholarly and it is popular. It brings theory to life and life to theory. It plays with personal polemic, positing a speaking self in the act of writing "I," and then, self-reflectively and self-reflexively, it deconstructs itself. Autotheory's genealogies spring from the institutions it seeks to critique. It privileges thinking with over thinking against; its politics of citation unveil its relations. From social media technologies to the publishing industry, from live performance to visual art, autotheory's escalating ubiquity in cultural production serves as a provocation: why autotheory and why now? What motivates the methodological melding of an autobiographical "I" with academic scholarship? What implications does theorizing the self have for the politics of knowledge production? A digital companion to the special issue of ASAP/Journal, this cluster animates the autotheoretical intersections of art and art writing in time-based media. Transmedial in form and provocative by design, these works appear accompanied by autotheory's telltale synthesis of critical-creative writing. The cluster includes film and video by Maider Fortune, Annie Macdonell, and Ree Botts; performance for the camera and documentation of live performances by Ceylan Öztürk, Calla Durose-Moya, lo bil, and Mel Keiser; web-based work, including memes, by Simon Evnine and Piper Curtis; other moving-images, including GIFs, by Migueltzinta C. Solis, and sound-based work by Arezu Salamzadeh. Off the page and on the screen, these autotheories invite as much as they imagine, contest as much as they contrive, and exude as much as they include.-Lauren Fournier and Alex Brostoff :

French artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) moved to New York, where she would reside the rest of her life, immediately after her marriage, in 1938. As a newcomer, a new wife, and a new mother, Bourgeois spent the first few years of her American life trying to balance domesticity and artistic practice. She resorted to producing prints, which afforded her certain flexibility compared to other medium. In 1947, Bourgeois created a small, printed booklet of illustrated parables, He disappeared into complete silence. This project, originally conceived as a way of inserting herself into the creative fabric of the city, proved to be a pivotal point for the artist. In it, Bourgeois presents a cast of anthropomorphised buildings, revealing a relationship between architecture and pathos. Bourgeois' architectural characters have been well-studied. This essay, though, wants to emphasise the way architectural and personal affect are explored in Bourgeois' texts for the booklet, and the way the artist juxtaposes visual and textual language.

The 2020-21 pandemic threw many of us into a forced exploration of our domestic interiors. For some, the limited contact with the exterior world provoked a need for a refuge and escape: the recurrence of the interior eventually gave way to our interiorities. Looking for ways to simultaneously materialise and circumvent a spatial, intimate, and spiritual sense of self, this visual essay borrows the sumptuous patterns and textures of the interior in Kitagawa Utamaro’s 1788 erotic print, Lovers in an Upstairs Room (Figure 01). These, cut-out as inspired by the block-printing process, have been layered with my own absolutely mundane, domestic setting. At the same time, two fragmentary voices, one ekphrastic and one auto-theoretical, mirror the print and the graphic layering, creating a third text by overlapping. These voices host a multiplicity of others: from the mystical classic The Interior Castle, 1577, by the sickly, cloistered, Spanish nun Teresa of Ávila, which describes an ecstatic topography of the soul; to Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s 2003 ‘Soft Architecture: A Manifesto,’ which calls for softness as a form of resistance; and for description as a mystical practice: ‘Practice description. Description is mystical.’01 Can the crash of voices, cultures, and imagery add up to one particular description? Can this description of one’s interiority at a very specific time build connections between tangible and immaterial, ordinary and extraordinary? Can there be a secular, soft topography of the self, of one’s interior castle, able to resist the advances of a hostile reality? There were several iterations with this piece, and I am seriously indebted to many for their feedback: Kris Pint, Nadia Sels, Patrícia Domingues, and Marta Gil Ulldemolins all made time to look at it and offer all sorts of assistance. The IDEA editors were exceptionally kind and attentive, and I am especially grateful to Julieanna Preston for all the time she poured into making this work better. I also want to put forward Tania Hershman’s endlessly inventive book and what if we were all allowed to disappear as an influence. If it did not exist, I do not think I would have created the text-couples in this essay

In Diagrammatic Writing (2013), Johanna Drucker discusses the power dynamics between texts interacting on a page. So-called autotheoretical texts often engage in similar types of performative and relational lay-outs, and yet, not much has been written about this formal phenomenon. Bearing this in mind, I propose an experiment that performs relations by thinking with, and through, Las Meninas, a self-portrait that is not strictly about the self. All that surrounds Velázquez in the painting (the work-in-progress we do not see, the ensemble of courtly characters, the framed reproductions of masters’ works, the much-discussed mirror reflection) informs and contextualises the portrait, but also explodes it into much more. This paper thus attempts to ask whether autotheory can, by being aware of performative and diagrammatic writing, together with the use of images as citations, decentralise the auto- and become a more choral scene, a cluster, a textual quodlibet or medley. Can a form of writing make space for a multitude, or even, a multitude into a space? Can the autotheoretical self be only one more of many characters, present, with agency, but off-centred? I would like to thank Sarah Jackson, Delphine Grass, Helena Hunter, and Hannah van Hove for letting me think out loud with them through this and other tangles in this text; and for making and holding a shared space for writing. I would not have come across Mark’s work if it was not for Arne de Winde

My practice traces lines between geological phenomena and transatlantic history. As a jewellery artist and a stone cutter, I focus on the properties and qualities of materials but also on their respective histories and the environments we cohabit with them. The fractures and the cuts I consciously create in materials are performative gestures and intersections of the materials’ stories and my own in the past and the present. In this paper, while exploring a personal, fragmentary approach towards creative writing and revisiting family lineages, I will use an autoethnographic methodology to divagate between landscapes of union and disunion. I will embark on an interweaving of lines—my own, those of the material and of history—as a way of expanding my practice into a broader scene of ideas and events. From the boats docking in Lisbon during the fifteenth-century Portuguese colonial period, to the exploration of gemstones at German markets and my grandfather’s abandoned notebooks, how do the lines of history translate into a sequence of performative gestures? Where does the past end and the present begin?