On the tip of your Tongue / Abigail Conway / Forest Fringe, Edinburgh Festival 2008

On Sunday 10th August, it was discovered that Forest Fringe, a performance venue operating during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival had been broken into. Money, laptops and other valuables had been stolen. One untouched item was a sealed empty jar. From one perspective this is hardly surprising. However, if you surveyed the audience who participated in “On the tip of your tongue” they might have voted this jar the most valuable item in the building. The jar contained proclamations of hopes, dreams, desires, fears and fantasies.

On the 9th August the participants entered the large space upstairs in single file. Slight adjustments such as the clearing the space of extraneous furniture - allowing the architecture and original décor to breathe and the replacement of electric lights with candles - brought the building’s original function as a church to life. This immediately transformed our interaction with the space: we intuitively responded by speaking in hushed tones, moving at a slower pace and becoming receptive to a contemplative mode of thought.

On entry we were handed a small plastic bag by the artist, Abigail Conway (it was the sort drugs are traded in). Inside the bag was a finely folded envelope and writing sheet, both made of rice paper (no larger in surface area than a box of matches). Also in the bag were typographically playful instructions as to how to use the bag’s contents.

On a table in front of a screen were ‘edible-ink’ pens . Here you were encouraged to write whatever you felt on your paper and seal it in the envelope. The next step was to ascend a stairway to another platform (it might have formerly been an altar). On this table were two jars. In one you placed your envelope, dropping it into a jar full of other envelopes. From this jar you also removed a stranger’s envelope. After reading the stranger’s note and eating it, you spoke the words aloud into a second jar, then descended the staircase, free to leave or consort with others.

The experience literally asks of us to ‘eat our words’, as a phrase it is negative, ‘to eat one’s words’ is an act of defeat, or revision, but in these circumstances there is a warmth to the act. It is a symbolic means of keeping something treasured by enmeshing it within you. The logic that consumption is a means of achieving greater proximity to an idea or concept is most explicit in the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, again our attention is returned to the history of the site.

Thus we are partake in a conceptual game exercising our capacity to ‘make-believe‘. We are bound by an essentially ‘intra-audience’ experience – the strength of the work lying in what he have communally experienced. The emphasis lies in what has happened between us, this is valued over what might be extrapolated from the outside by from those who weren’t there. Our capacity to believe is enhanced by the delicacy of the envelopes and other rice-paper made paraphernalia; their aesthetic harks back to literary descriptions of woodland fairytales: objects from other worlds left in ours by chance or good fortune.

Any assumptions of speech as ‘writing made permanent’ are overturned. The act of eating the words is a destruction of this permanence, in doing so a substitution of one permanence for another occurs. The eating is part of a relay that begins in thought and culminates in speech – the act of speaking into the jar is both symbolic and physical; yet we are given the space to imagine that it could be more than this, that there might be, somehow, a means beyond science of containing these voiced thoughts. The achievement of “On the tip of your tongue” lies in its allowance and encouragement of this possibility… that if we were to put the jar to our ear and listen hard enough and long enough we might hear what was whispered.