My research-driven performance work grows out of an engagement with the geologic, more-than-human bodies. My relationship with them is built mainly through sensory engagement and a very intuitive being-with1. I observe them, taste and smell, as well as touch. This methodology is informed by new materialist and ecological philosophical orientations, which position materiality as active and relational, and therefore require research practices that engage with the sensuous, event-based, and more-than-human dimensions of encounter.
1“Dasein is essentially Being-with, and the ‘world’ is always the one that I share with Others.”
—Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 155.
My crazy idea to dance with the geological and the theoretical conviction that they are in fact, belonging to the field of performance, has led me to Iceland— closer to their tectonically trembling, soakingly wet and seductively hot bodies. These encounters have soothed my loneliness, they have held me when nothing else seemed to be able to hold so much, they have also made me feel insignificant revere them even more and feel terribly inspired when facing them. Field trips here in Iceland have made me increasingly aware of the extractive nature of our relationship with the geologic forces and the complexity of our embodied entanglements.
Geological materialities have been, conventionally, perceived to belong to the medium of sculpture and installation. Some thing monumental and larger than us, something that can stand there and commemorate our life after we have passed. This does make sense since the geological does seem unchanging in comparison to our own life time. Installation practice, which deals with the relationships between elements, already comes closer to what I'm proposing here, but also not nearly enough. I propose to see geological not as sculptural materiality but rather as performative beings. Beings with their own rhythms, be they much slower in tempo than ours, their own beats and stides as well as breakdowns.
My research project challenges the conventional boundary between the sculptural and the performative. Matter, at the core, is performative and vibrant, and as Karen Barad puts it, “Matter doesn’t move in time. Matter doesn’t evolve in time. Matter does time. Matter materializes and enfolds different temporalities.”2 My practice sees sculpture as an ongoing process, not unlike performance. I question, what does this worldview of an ongoing flow of processes, and matter as constantly recycling energy mean for performance and sculpture?
2Karen Barad, “On Touching: The Alterity Within,” YouTube video, 1:XX:XX (insert actual length if known), posted by STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE, June 27, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7LvXswjEBY (accessed December 11, 2024)
We transform into one another and are already multiplicities, hybrids and chimaeras that have been the other and that consist of many others. A constant dance of minerals across intra-active3 bodies, where an individual is a dynamic force and already a multi-species cyborg. In particular, I explore what this means regarding our own embodied being in this material world.
3A term by Karen Barad describing how the very activity of (inter)action also forms and creates the bodies that are (inter)acting. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/i/intra-action.html
When I was a child, my dad told me a story. He said, “Imagine that you are a microbe that lives for only one second. You are born at the tip of a wive on a stormy sea at night. In the last moments before dying, the microbe looks around and concludes, what a dark and static world, only huge unmoving mountains all around.”
This story by my physicist dad was stored somewhere at the back of my mind until I started to think of the geologic as moving and living entities, or, perhaps, I was thinking of the geologic as a dynamic being because this story was ingrained in me. Being introduced to process throught in my bacelour studies and reading new materialism such as Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning and Matter by Karen Barad further confirmed my suspicions that this perceptable static world is a dynamic acosystem that might seem static and monumental only because of our specific perspectives and very temporal nature and the differences in our timescales, similarly to the microb’s perception of the waves, which looked form our perspective are very perceptibly fluing and dynamic.
This text also features in Choreographies in deep-time rhythms: for temporarily warm bodies.