Alien - Ecologies of Attention

Ecologies of Attention

Vitruvius draws an analogy between the proportions of temples and the human body in Book III of his treatise “De Architectura Libri Decem” (22 B.C.): “For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; …”. Charles Darwin, in turn, uses the body in a peculiarly similar way to capture the morphology of the plant “On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing” (1862): “The position of the antennae in this Catasetum may be compared with that of a man with his left arm raised and bent so that his hand stands in front of his chest, and with his right arm crossing his body lower down so that the fingers project just beyond his left side.” Through performative interventions, embodied perspectives in correspondences with vegetal modes of perception and movement are critically re-read. A coming into view of a bodily becoming-of a body in the shared splitting of bodies and views; the translation of their mute and encrypted voices provoke other, unfocused modes of “looking”. Experimenting with discordances and incompatibilities of motions and sense in pursuit of the flickering, the incoherent and the unrecognizable othering, we together enter dimensions of erroring and find pleasure in their synesthetic imprints, alien and yet weirdly familiar.