“Vikki Reads Kristeva” is a performance, which I developed from an ongoing project in which I have been transcribing Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror onto ephemeral or discarded surfaces; written in felt pen on windows and mirrors, or on cigarette packets, items in builders’ skips, old newspapers, foil chip bags, soiled tissues. These have mostly been found outside, or if at home, about to be thrown away.

In the performance, I am playing two women: the fictive Vikki Chopper, my Rose Selavy, my female alter-ego, and the very real Bulgarian-French writer and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, whose words I am reading. Vikki, sitting in front of book-lined shelves, in her smartest office attire, reads selected passages from The Powers of Horror, covering topics of the feminine, identity, and self.