Information, Medium & Society: Twenty-second International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

This paper presents a creative interpretation of Homi Bhabha’s theories on third space, realised through creative collaboration between artists in Australia and China. While third space theory conveys a socio-political space of conflict and incommensurability, this paper proposes that visual art can re-imagine third space as a non-political liminal space unhindered by language differences, offering a shifting and dynamic space between cultures, between philosophies and within opposing ideologies. Through this intervention a new working space emerges that fosters interaction and negotiation outside our lived experiences and beyond our normal perceptions of how life and art can interact. The transfer and translation of complex knowledge and ideas across language divides inevitably involves miscommunication and misinterpretation, producing a form of poetic thirding that perhaps better represents the realities of cross-cultural communication. Within this in-between language, divergent cultural histories are critiqued and explored, proposing the notion that traditional linear history-telling no longer represents the realities of dynamic cultures in flux. Several key thinkers on space and place are examined to contextualise an abstract notion of time and space that re-presents history as a series of relational non-synchronous moments in time, while offering artists fertile ground for collaboration that is no longer restricted by language translation, or by the established hegemonies of our constructed histories. The paper offers two case studies in which intimate artistic collaborative practice can reverse third space polarity as a space of conflict, replaced by an imaginative space in which timeless interactive thirding occurs through art-making and ongoing creative communication.