8. Humour as Heterotopic Friction

Historically, the Welsh language has been used divisively when defining Welsh identity. For many native non-Welsh speakers within Wales, this has generated a feeling of exclusion from the national narrative. Questioning how Anglo-Welsh identity is presented and problematised, Jones’s artistic practice employs humour in a personal and a self-critical way. Jones argues that in political and artistic contexts humour is fundamentality about ‘heterotopic friction’, where multiple heterogeneous frames of utterances create conflict, rub up against or graft onto one another. Jones’s performances employ heterotopic friction to amplify how imagined sites encounter the actual in order to reveal a plurality of propositions that challenge dominant concepts of cultural identity.