Susan participated in the recent Ph.D. Symposium presenting recent developments in her research together with a new performative sound work.

Susan Matthews, The Reading Room, Alex Design Exchange, June 2025

Abstract:

Susan Matthews: Scar music, non-place and the body.

In Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (1994), Marc Augé proposed the concept of a non-place, which is defined as any space which resists the significance of place, or in which we experience “an absence of the place from itself”. Non-places are spaces of transience, spaces we occupy but where we do not live our lives to the full: Waiting rooms, corridors, airport terminals, motorways… et al.

My research centres on the proposition that when a breast cancer tumour is surgically removed from the breast, it leaves behind a void, a non-place, a place that has lost its “inscription of space with memory” (Ioannidou, 2024), thus transforming it into a space of liminality delineated through the use of titanium surgical clips left in the breast post-surgery to mark the area where the tumour was removed. The photographer Jim Brogden (2019) writes that; “There is the sense when walking through […] non-places, that they are fugitive locations”: The breast post tumour removal becomes a fugitive location.

“In Western society, Women’s breasts symbolize femininity and female sexuality. Damage to, or removal of, the breasts is aberrant in a heteronormative culture that is obsessed with breasts.” (Bury, 1982). Through excision of a breast cancer tumour and related milk ducts, tissue, skin, etc., the ‘meaning’ of the female breast changes; it is no longer a site of nourishment for young, a sexual signifier, or indeed an indicator of femininity; it is a non-place.

Ioannidou, when speaking about urban non-place, suggests that after traumatic experiences, “the revisitation of place, whether occurring as an actual physical relocation within it or as mere recollection, initiates its harrowing transformation from a site of familiarity and comfort into non-place.” (2024) I propose that as a result of surgical procedures, the female breast is harrowingly transformed from a site of familiarity into a non-place.

References:

Augé, M. (1992). Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, Le Seuil, Verso.

Ioannidou, E. (2023). “Non-places of memory: interstitiality and the social function of space in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Ellen Wood’s Danesbury House (1860)”. European Journal of English Studies, 27(2), 205–227.

Brogden, J. (2019) Photography and the Non-Place: The Cultural Erasure of the City. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bury, M. (1982) “Chronic illness as biographical disruption”, Sociology of Health and Illness, vol. 4 (2),  pp. 167-82.

 Punc. Presentation photograph by Dafydd Williams, 2025

Punc. An encounter with thought, was hosted by Dr Marilyn Allen at The Reading Room, Alex Design Exchange, Swansea, June 2025.