About:

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This artistic research looks into the encounter and the nature of relationality between human and non-human bodies through the intervention of performance art. The aim of this research is to practically discover the agency of and Becoming with non-human bodies (in particular objects) in and through my performative encounters. By engaging with posthumanist theory, this research applies the concept of intra-action as a way to approach these encounters. Posthumanist philosopher Karen Barad refers to intra-action as “pre-established bodies that participate in action with each other…agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces” (Barad, 2007, 141). My desire to investigate the intra-active encounter between human and non-human bodies emerges from the need to explore this dynamism of forces to question the singular notion of human subjectivity. Through this research I aim to open multifarious perspectives to initiate becoming with non-humans. According to feminist scholar Donna Haraway, becoming, is to embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.  Initiating states of multiplicity is important for me to make the subjecthood of humans malleable so that the growing superiority of the human and thus their exploitation of the non-human bodies can be countered.

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My inquiry into the visible rhizomatic relations between human and non-human bodies and Becoming with non-human bodies through performance art brings to focus the encounter and interchangeability of bodies and materiality, in order to expand human subjectivity. My interest in this inquiry stems from the crisis of a growing disconnection, exploitation and ownership that the human performs on non-human bodies, thereby, resulting in the transference of these habits and practices towards relations with other humans and the self. Using performance art as an intervention, I am interested in reforming human relations with non-human bodies through attention, care and intimacy.

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Thesis and artistic work synopsis:

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The dissertation project Becom(th)ings: Posthumanism, Subjectivity, Performance Art is a phenomenological artistic research culminating in the performance installation Roo(u)ting. The research is an artistic-philosophical-material inquiry into processual Becoming with objects, both organic and inorganic, from everyday life. It is driven by the desire to make visible the rhizomatic and fluid relations between human and more-thanhuman bodies through making apparent the agencies of objects, our liquid entangled ontologies and the ethics of care for per/forming intra-active affective relations with bodies of the world. It applies phenomenology, autobiography and diffraction as methods to attend to emergent phenomena, difference making practices and an inquiry into the practices of self/other. It hopes to make malleable and expand fixed notions of human subjectivity by offering a rooted but routing approach—stable yet seeking contingent paths of relations with matter. An approach, that attends to the merging of personal and material knots of identity. The research through Roo(u)ting, a participatory performance installation, offers the figuration of multitudinous body—through embodied materiality—as emergent collective yet personal subjectivity/ies, for a practice of fluid self-identification. It attempts to bridge the increasingly growing isolation, dominance, exploitation and crisis of the human in the Anthropocene epoch. It envisions doing this, by making transferable the ethics of care, intimacy and interconnectedness, to human-human relations via material practices of becoming with everyday objects (that we share our intimacies and life with). This thesis iii offers the theoretical foundations and my conceptual and creative methods of working with posthumanist philosophies and performance art, to create performance ecologies of material embodiment. The project desires to inculcate a fluid sensibility and sensuality, as bodies of and in the world, to dissolve the boundaries of ‘self’ and ‘other’, to flow towards a ‘we’ and ‘our’.

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Full MA Thesis