The Mill never ceases to fill me with awe and inspiration. It is a sensory playground, dense with material and immaterial histories, a place where time opens up and slows down, and with it, so does my imagination. Within its walls, I feel safe and open, my curiosity is awakened: my body goes into a rest (regenerative and creative) mode. This bears a striking contrast to my state of being the moment I step outside into the street where I feel overwhelmed, a need to close myself off: my body goes into flight (survival) mode.
Survival mode has come to be the predominant way that many humans engage with urban public spaces in Malta. Urban landscapes are thick environments, dense with matter, dense with sensory information. To let all of this in is to open your body to overwhelm. Overwhelm as a way of life is, however, unsustainable. So we shut things off. We shut away the noise, fumes, dust, aggression, oppression. We can’t possibly feel it all. Sometimes we can’t feel at all. But I want to feel it - I want to, to borrow from Donna Haraway, “[stay] with the trouble” of these spaces, to get curious about them and find new ways of relating. I want to feel that sense of flow that I feel inside the Mill in urban public spaces, at least some of the time. With this in mind, some questions emerged:
- What if there are ways to bring ourselves to feel open and curious in urban public spaces?
- How might we leak that sense of safety and openness out of the Mill and into its surroundings?
To feel open and curious in public spaces is to see things through a different lens, getting curious about things we are not normally curious about, like an alien landing on a new planet. It is to perform in a way that is unexpected, different, heterogeneous, otherwise, unfamiliar, also alien. It is to be affected (emotionally moved) by things in ways that you’re not meant to be affected. It is to be, what Sara Ahmed (2017) terms, an “affect alien”.
For Ahmed, affect aliens are people who live a feminist life, and in doing so, often come to play the role of killjoys by pointing out the cracks in things which we would rather ignore. In this project, affect aliens are also drawn to the cracks in things, though within the cracks, we find creative potential, and this excites us. We are living our feminist lives here as joymakers rather than joykillers. We are “made happy by the wrong things,” (Ahmed, 2017). For us, these things are often inhuman things, things we are told not to touch, things laden with negative affect. Another question emerged to drive our research process:
- If we follow our alien curiosity in and around the Mill, where would it take us?
With the Mill as our alien mothership, we feel safe to explore the spaces around it as curious, creative aliens. We can dip in to rest and recharge, regroup, refocus, and step out again to wander and wonder. Having this safe haven to return to, we feel courageous enough to perform as aliens. We feel courageous enough to open our bodies, to feel and touch.
Wandering around the Mill as an affect alien has showed me that to touch public spaces with my body is both frightening and wondrous. Within each touch, I find an opportunity to relate differently, more response-ably, more caringly, more compassionately. For within each touch, I encounter “an infinity of others - other beings, other spaces, other times” (Barad, 2015)... and this moves me. It is not so difficult to be moved by human matters in public spaces. Though through the lens of posthumanism, within the human, the inhuman is always already present, and this is not so difficult to forget. As a posthuman in becoming, I have been asking, together with my fellow affect aliens:
- “How would we [move/create] if it is by the inhuman that we came to feel, care, respond?” (Barad, 2015).
As an affect alien, I consider my ‘body’ not as a singular ‘human’ entity, but as a network of diverse components within a continuum of “zoe-geo-techno-matter” (Braidotti, 2022). It is an ever-changing constellation of organic, inorganic, and technological matter.
Zoe - living agents, including co-creators bread dough
Geo - clay, dust, stone, chemicals, polaroids
Techno - mobiles, cameras, biometric sensors, data, digital art
From a posthumanist standpoint, I integrate health data as an explicit component of techno-matter. From a feminist standpoint, this integration of health data aims to subvert the system of data-driven cognitive capitalism. Affect aliens take ‘rational’ data, apply it in ‘non-rational’ ways as a co-creating agent. This data becomes a source of creativity and agency, rather than a source of capital and/or control.
As an affect alien, I consider my artistic practice as transdisciplinary and collaborative, always operating with and through different media and materials, alongside different artists and agents. The knowledge and material which emerge are always already co-creations, products of the specific assemblages of human and inhuman agents within a specific space and time. Ambient temperature, humidity levels, noise levels, sunlight, traffic and pedestrian rhythms, birds, trees, umbrellas, metal barriers, wifi networks, heart rate data, limestone walls, Gabriel Caruana artworks, Benna milkshake cartons, pistachio shells, cigarette butts, stray underwear, empty pizza boxes… all of these agents play a role in affect alien processes. And with time, the histories of these agents also become embodied and embedded. Our affect alien bodies and creations become archives of the Mill and its surroundings.
Romeo
Romeo and I become playful aliens, enacting acts of care as a queer alien practice. We go about queering space and data, taking up digital and physical space to open up queer spaces. Our bodies are techno-mediated through mobile phone cameras, using software to rematerialise our bodies as digital art. We use bread-making as a tool for place-making, employing bread dough as a material extension of the Mill, a co-creating agent placed between bodies. Bread dough becomes an archive of the living and nonliving cultures. Speaking with and through bread dough beckons a slowing down, a welcome form of resistance, sometimes so slow that we perform as queer sculpture.
Sarah
Sarah and I become trickster aliens, playing with matter and time. We perform a layering of matters: our alien journey materialised as polaroid images, which we then expose to chemical agents of the space over time, and eventually lifted onto objects from within the space. Our affective journey produces an object which is affected by the space over time, which we then layer onto another object chosen affectively. The site-specificity of this process aims to magnify the essences of the Mill and its surroundings within objects laden with alien affect. With each image, there is a relinquishment of control and an opening of possibilities, allowing other agents to take over - the image may be damaged, destroyed, or may even disappear.
Kamila
Kamila and I become tactile aliens, fascinated by dirt, dust, and debris. With clay as our geo-matter, we take and make impressions, give and receive pressure. We are all about -press- and mess. The clay resists, and makes us slow down, listen, move slowly and with care, our hands becoming feminist hands. Touching the space becomes massaging the space, and receiving massage from the space. Through the clay, we gather traces, picking up and leaving behind bodily matters. The clay conceals and reveals matters, inviting us to imagine what lies beneath and beyond, to develop counter-narratives. Like bread dough, clay is a co-creator and interlocutor, a facilitator of kinships, a modulator of imaginaries and movements. It becomes a material archive of bodily conversations.
Data
Data and I perform in a collaborative affective continuum in alliance with techno-devices. With biometric sensors, we put emotional responses into numbers. Our preferred metric for this is Heart Rate Variability (HRV), an indicator of rest or stress mode. Data shows that my stress mode HRV is under 55, and my rest mode is over 60. In public spaces, my HRVs are usually under 60. Kneading dough with Romeo, lifting images with Sarah, and touching spaces through clay with Kamila brought my public space HRV above 60 a number of times. So we venture deeper down these paths, and to seek to create from within them. Taking data quite literally into my own hands on my mobile phone, I accept that data is part of my ‘body’ and surroundings. Dancing with data is my (feminist) attempt to actively participate in the technoverse, harnessing numbers for creative rather than capitalist purposes.