Q. How can we move towards more speculative, imaginative (instead of normative) ways for constructing public space, so that we may open space for alternative (to capitalism) social configurations that are more communal?
A, I respond to this through feminist, posthumanist perspectives which stand at the core of my artistic research in public space, site-specific dance, and screen dance practices, focusing particularly on ‘affect aliens’ - a multidisciplinary exhibition presented in Malta last year.
“When you are alienated by virtue of how you are affected, you are an affect alien” (Ahmed, 2017, p.57).
“An affect alien is made happy by the wrong things” (Ahmed, 2017, p.64).
Here, Sara Ahmed refers to the ability to sense injustices through a feminist lens, and the alienation that is experienced as a consequence of pointing them out. She speaks also of the sensory overwhelm that comes with “being in touch with the world”, noticing the unnoticed, and feeling outside of the normative range of affect. This relates to the overwhelm I often experience in busy public spaces due to a heightened sensitivity towards the movement of bodies in space through dance training, as well as studies in performing public space.
Ahmed’s conceptualization of the “affect alien” served as a potent device for speculation and imagination in the artistic process of the exhibition. It inspired me to go towards “the wrong things”, staying open and curious, like an alien landing on new terrain, wanting to feel, to touch, everything.
I chose to narrow my attention to affect down to touch, specifically points of encounter between my body and other bodies. Within this choice, there is an attempt to apply my body as a tool for knowledge-making, so as to move away from traditional anthropocentric perspectives towards posthuman ones.
Within “affect aliens”, I also experimented with a reconceptualization of the human body proposed by Rosi Braidotti. Braidotti frames the “body” not as a singular “human” entity, but as a network of diverse components within a continuum of “zoe-geo-techno-matter” (Braidotti, 2022, p.135). This notion suggests the interconnectedness of the biological (zoe), geological (geo), the technological (techno), and the material (matter). It invites us to consider wider, more complex ecologies, which I find particularly generative in the context of artistic research in public space.
I applied this concept when choosing collaborators and identifying artistic means for our co-creations, always ensuring that each part of the continuum is given attention. To briefly elaborate on this:
Romeo Roxman Gatt - visual and performance artist, trans man and archiver of trans histories. We worked with zoe and techno elements as bread dough and digital media. The bread dough was a material extension of the body of the Mill - the building which housed the research and exhibition, which used to be an old flour Mill which you can see on the bottom right. As the dough modulated the bodily conversations I had with the space, it became an archive of living and nonliving cultures. We digitised dough dialogues as queer sculptures.
Sarah Bonaci - photographer. We chose to work with polaroid photography, using a technique called lifting. We lifted images onto various found objects, most of them stones (geo) and some more domestic items like milkshake cartons. Debris is transformed by images of my body moving in the site where the debris was found, a layering of matter and time.
Kamila Wolcsczak - visual artist and fellow performing public space alumni. We chose to work with clay, another geo-component. When working with clay you enter a different temporal space which is much slower-paced than the norm. Through the clay, we gathered traces, picking up and leaving behind bodily matters. Kamila then developed the clay imprints into sculptures. Like bread dough, clay is a co-creator and interlocutor, a facilitator of kinships, a modulator of imaginaries and new ways of doing things.