"The feminine journey is a story unfolding, and its epiphanies come through real things, through tangibles like walking sticks and dreams and deer antlers-all of which we might miss without taking time and space in Deep Being" - Sue Monk Kidd
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...But I'd rather say in Deep Becoming.
Who am I?
I?
who am I? who?
you! ...Between... through... with...
who am I?
am?
who? am? I? i i i i i i ............................................dissolving the i...................
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to become you, they, it.........us
...ellipses...contingent ontologies...
I am interested in looking at how a diffractive tool can help generate knowledge of material entanglements and Becoming with more-than-human bodies....
The encounters between 'I' and the more-than- 'I' is vital to my research as they are the meeting points that shed light on the material entanglements, that 'my' body is in dynamic relation with.
Relationality through an active bodily engagement is the material dialogue that merges the space and the apparent boundaries of our bodies demarcating these spaces as separate from one another to find porosity and exchange.
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My desire towards an object and its vibrant pull opens up a multifarious potentiality of changing subject-object positions as our materialities dialogue with one another with affective capacities.
Our bodies are different (not separate) and through a diffractive lens the effects of these differences can be marked by the affects that emerge through dialogue.
The mask can be assumed to be an object of representation of my face-my 'identity'- as it is presumably the exact copy. This highlights homogeneity as the marker of representative thinking. But through a diffractive lens, the performative act of molding is a transmaterial engagement, where my fingers, plaster of paris/gypsum, water, air, vaseline, DNA and the skin on my face come into a dialogue as they intra-act and engage in constant negotiation, that creates a mask that is my face but different. It does not mold my contours exactly but rather differently because the material exercises a certain agency, as it moves from malleable to hard, affecting my face by completely limiting its movement, as my face affects its form. These affects reveal the effects of the difference between the softness of the flesh and the soft-to-hard temperament of the material, revealing the unique patterns that emerge by noticing the finer details--creating new and different lines, contours, features that are similar yet not-- through the collision of the forces of transmaterial relationality.
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This dialogue contributes to the Becoming of some'body' to some'thing'.
A Thingbody.
It is important for my research to engage with a diffractive dialogue to insist on rethinking reflexivity or reflective practices as it reflects on the world from the outside, away from the looker, while holding the world at a distance instead of engaging from within it.
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The image of the mirror entangled with the face holds as an inspiration to bridge this gap between the world or the more-than-human, and to imagine it as a 'diffractive mirror'- that which opposes reflexivity and representationalism as it looks/sees through one another, bringing the exteriority within.
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An ongoing understanding and reconfiguring of the 'exteriority within' notion manifests in 'Meditating with Objects', a score or exercise that aims at building cognizance of the perceptive porosity of our bodies and material entanglements through subtle sensory dialogues between the bodies of a chosen object and I. Through the reversal of meditation as a form of detachment from the world and diving into the self, this score seeks to create meditation as an act of letting go of one's sense of self and attending to and attuning with an object and its subtle sensations and animations that often go unnoticed by the conditioned human body.
Cold, dry, textured, warm, vibrations, sounds...
Energies are transferred through materials and their interfaces. Through experimentation, personally, physical contact became very important for this score/exercise, for the flow of matter-energy through the interface of the surfaces. The dissolving of the 'I'--the notion of the emotional, mental, physical discrete body--is urged to dissolve...dissolve into the object that does not function as an object of focus or concentration enhancement but as a vital and vibrant matter that is collaboratively engaged in this act.
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Diffractively, the mark and effects of difference occurs in the encounter/dialogue between the bodies and the frictions that rise out of it. The friction and tension between the flesh that is conditioned to perceive certain sensations and the subtle animations and sensations of the chair and stair, their varying intensities of sensations and sometimes the absolute sense of void that emerges from the material entanglements with differing intensities. When I tested this score with my colleagues during the Diffractive Dialogues week, these frictions surfaced where the conscious act of entanglement gave rise to emotional affects that made the mental process of 'dissolving the I' tricky. But the conscious act of always returning to that attempt releases the friction ever so slightly in order to connect and be present to other affects that occur through the materiality of the two (and mroe) bodies in contact. These frictions and the negotiations with them, reconfigure subject-object positions as the flesh pushes its limits further to perceive that which seems like nothing, but infact has the agency to affect.
Flesh against wood
Wood against flesh
Contact...dissolving...time
Wood-flesh-wood-flesh-wood...
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Chair, stair, flesh...the minute vibrations, form, shape have affective capacities on the body and with duration the presumed boundaries begin merging...or dissolving into one another...
Looking through one another and being perceptive to the subtleties present within, around and between bodies plays a key role in breaking binaries to liquify boundaries, to merge and emerge, as ever evolving, changing, shifting, reconfiguring what it is to be a transmaterial 'I', from within the world, always in a state of Becoming with...