from matter to fictions - open practice at MDT Stockholm, "exiting the dark days", together with Petra Söör
"On a sunny Tuesday mornig on 4 June in the grate over the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam's Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore, there was:
one large men's black plastic glove
one dense mat of oak pollen
one unblemished dead rat
one white plastic bottle cap
one smooth stick of wood
...stuff exhibitied its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying. At the very least it provoked affects in me..."
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press Durham and London, 2010
to matter is to exist
to exist is to care
to care is to hold
to hold is to be carried
to be carried is to be touched
to be touched is to be heavy
to be heavy is to weight
to weight is to have a gravitational field....
"I read these interventions as manifesting a deepened attention to materiality and embodiment, an invitation to rethink relationality in its corporeal character, as well as a desire for concrete, tangible, engagement with worldly transformation— all features and meanings that pertain to the thinking with care that I am exploring in this book." Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care. University of Minesota Press (2017)
utterance: knowing through matter
Questioning the dichotomy and separation between Nature-Culture, Object-Subject, Natural-Artificial, knowing through matter is knowing through fact—corporeal and tangible knowledge—from crystals and atoms to force fields and affects. It means recognizing the influence and interdependency of one with their environment, as opposed to individual salvation, neoliberal speculation, and empty promises.
I understand matter as everything that has a gravitational field—everything that attracts, affects, repels, or is affected.
Knowing through matter invites us to embody experience, to be vulnerable, to become and transform through and with other matters (human, non-human, micro, or macro).
Matter matters. It shifts human- and Western-centered forms of knowing into the background and opens new fields of possibility for being together, for care, and for responsible world-making.
