Katrina Nzegwu
Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo, (Goldsmiths CCA, 2024), pp. 47, £6
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“What is the difference between truth and experience?” A hushed audience in the brutalist basement of Goldsmiths’ Centre for Contemporary Arts sits in waiting for the answer to the much-pondered question. The query is framed by writer and critic Orit Gat; the queried is Aea Varfis-van Warmelo – author of the newly-launched poetry collection, Intellectual Property. In summary – experience is that which the law seeks to control, and truth is a moral standard we spend our lives struggling to achieve. At once wry and hopeful, the remark is perfectly suited to the self-titled writer of “apocalypse, deceit, and other good things.”
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Intellectual Property launched on 10 January, the 11th of Goldsmiths’ CCA’s Episodes: solo presentation and commissions that comprise arresting contradictions to, and interstices within, the gallery’s primary programme. Warmelo’s Episode witnessed the gathering of three long-form compositions, into a pamphlet defiant of typical syntax and poetic subject. Exploring what it means to produce and possess an idea, Intellectual Property applies brusque legal-ese to the most tender of subjects. Whilst collating the legal and the lyrical may seem nonsensical, their remits overlap to a greater than one might think. The poetic impetus is the attempt to the most intangible of entities – feelings – palpable: and does the law not do that too? Both are human-fabricated systems of comprehension, designed to translate the ineffability of human experience into something that approaches the universally applicable.
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We start with the intricacies of gene patenting (it is important to note, before detail follows, that animals cannot be proprietors of copyright, “for invention is the human condition.”) A 2013 lawsuit challenging the validity of issued patents covering isolated DNA sequences is extrapolated to a) a niece’s conception via IVF, and b) the extraction of an “accident.” And so it follows that perhaps the most natural of human acts – sex – becomes a point of legislation not at the point where the child itself is conceived, but at the point of the decision to do so. How does this follow when impregnation is accidental? The verdict – compositions of (human) matter cannot not be licensed or branded – “human nature is beyond some jurisdictions.”
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Next: the law that belongs to Sam’s son, so called for the epithet (Son of Sam) adopted by the first man it applied to – serial killer David Berkowitz. With the court determining no criminal has the right to profit from the publicity of their crimes, Berkowitz was barred from selling his story to the press. Warmelo’s Son of Sam is just that: a son, a fourteen-year-old boy plagued by the vagaries of adolescence – like the image in the mirror, and the prospect of school tomorrow. In section one Warmelo narrates her sister’s pregnancy with a tenderness that overwhelms the adjacent legal patter; so too is our proverbial son handled with care. The blessing and curse of teenagehood – to feel so deeply yet be so little aware of how much of the world is yours – is captured by Warmelo with a sophisticated yet relatable linguistic flair. Just as Berkowitz’s “right” to tell his own story was stripped from him, so too does our proverbial son feel that his life is something that is not enacted, but received: acts of transgression and digression are inflicted upon him, with the sense that “he has never once made a decision of his own.” The verdict – “the only reward for aberration can be intrigue.”
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And last: the Leibniz Newton Calculus Controversy – the debate of two great mathematicians, over who was the greatest. What began simmering in 1699 erupted years later in 1711, when Newton’s supporters accused Leibniz of plagiarising Newton’s unpublished ideas, thus taking undue credit for the invention of calculus. Apt – the branch is the mathematical study of change – that the analysis of shift resulted in its socio-legal application. Who is to say who was lying; who was not? Warmelo exploits this ambiguity – the motif: “these images are not real/these images are true” – for there are very many truths, and each coexists simultaneously and infinitely. We bounce back and forth between geography and time – Warmelo’s bedroom; the meeting of Newton and Leibniz; Freud in an undisclosed location in the 1890s. The narrative flux reflects the fact that, in actuality, what is in flux is not the truth, for one’s own truth is always the truth. What wavers is one’s experience of the thing in question, for it is that which comes to constitute truth – and isn’t the control of experience the point of the law? The verdict – veracity (and ownership) “is a matter of how we invent the world/it is a matter of how to keep a secret” – “let public memory conserve” what they perceive to be candid.
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To construct a narrative-in-verse of human relations around the aegis of the law is ambitious, yet Warmelo’s pamphlet adjudicates with effortless verbal fluidity. Imposed are the structural guidelines of concrete poetry: imperfect syntax transforms expositions on complex regulations into blocks and shapes that constitute a poetry in themselves. If you have ever read a legal contract, Warmelo’s spreads are not visually dissimilar – the emphatic deployment of slashes and dashes recall the subsections, clauses and addendums used in accords and settlements as a form of punctuation. Whilst approaching the prosaic in terms of length and division, Warmelo’s disregard for grammatical conventions pays homage to, yet disrupts and furthers a poetic legacy.
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Poignant whilst discussing the right of possession, was the form of Intellectual Property’s launch itself, which constituted an ode to shared ownership: of space, time, and engagement with literary forms. Part of the line of contemporary cross-genre writers forgoing the traditional book launch, Warmelo invited friends and colleagues to contribute their own trade secrets, comprising a series of readings that poked, provoked and pleased in equal measure. Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola delivered an ode to failed love rooted in the spoken word tradition, broad syllables jutting against hardened cadence in exemplification of the heartbreaking awareness one’s well of affection has dried up. Part prose, part verse, Will Harris’ contribution meandered through various lives and livings, oscillating between the profoundly micro – his daily occupation as a care home worker – and the stunningly macro – the cultural origins of Stonehenge, and its spiritual significance in the hearts and minds of Britons today. Amy McCauley’s experiment in found poetry mined the archives of the gallery; appropriated artwork descriptions penned on cards found their way into the air – both via voice, and by dint of the energetic dissemination of the cards in question.
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To conceive of a notion is to engage with the theoretically unquantifiable – in deference to common parlance: thoughts are indeed free. The structuring of an arm of law around the most intangible of entities seems perfectly exemplary of human capitalistic proclivity – to have everything we can, even that which cannot be held. Intellectual Property’s achievement rests in precisely this fact: the fallibility of humanity in seeking to monopolise the ephemeral is rendered delicately, powerfully and ingeniously. Warmelo oscillates between the judicial and the personal, the legislative and the private, in a manner that captures the contradictions of our social media age – with the inner workings of state-sanctioned behaviour now offered up to the court of public opinion.
Image credit: Naomi Delorme
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Katrina Nzegwu is a London-based artist, writer and freelance curator. Currently working as Programme Research Lead for Bold Tendencies and across its sister commercial gallery Hannah Barry, she has written for platforms and places including Elephant Magazine, Aagh Zine, Smiths, Overdressed and Carrion Press, Studio West Gallery, and Em-dash Press. Katrina graduated from Goldsmiths College with a BA in Fine Art and History of Art, and from the Royal College of Art with a BA in Print.
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