Matter-As-Body: For A Kin-Aesthetics. (If Glueing Yourself To Te Hay Wain Isn’t Really Your Ting.)
Te upcoming text centres its discussion on matter, and so, before inviting you to begin reading, I frstly encourage you to take a few moments to sense the soil and the shell that accompany you with this publication. Te reasons for why these particular matters are present will become evident as you read. Tough for now, wish for you to refect on them as you fnd them here, and get to know them as they are... themselves.
How might you even go about sensing them? What senses are you perhaps using frst? And why? What can your body learn of these matters? What can it not?
Intermittently I will return you to the soil and shell; to the matter. I ask you to stay curious with them, and tune into your multi-sensorial body. To stay curious of the many ways you coalesce.
[43] If Gluing Yourself To Te Hay Wain Is Your Ting Te Hay Wain, Glue. Touch
[55] For A Kin-Aesthetics Manifold bodies coalesce
[31] Polymorphic registry Seeing is (not) believing
MATTER-AS-BODY
[17] Gestures Of A Plinth Matter as resource
CONTENTS
[9] Matter-as-body In a material plentitude
[9] Matter-as-body In a material plentitude
[1] Radical Landscapes. Exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK // 5 May - 4 September 2022
[2] Back To Earth. Exhibition at Serpentine Gallery, London, UK // 22 June18 September 2022
[3] Our Time On Earth. Exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London, UK // 5 May - 29 August 2022
[4]Te Curatorial Condition. Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022 (Sternberg Press) pg 55
In a material plentitude (of Earth), there seems something out of touch in the curatorial. It is at this point, with a zeitgeist of exhibitions delivering reparative ideas to counter, and live with ecological crises, that I fnd myself questioning their ways of exhibitioning.
My curiosity spiked last year, following visits to various eco-focused exhibits: Radical Landscapes1 , Back To Earth2 , Our Time On Earth3. Each brought its own integral awareness and radical thinking in how to navigate the present epoch of climate and geo-political conditions. Tough, to be specifc, it was in their materialities and physicality that I found myself most critical. Each produced an acutely similar eco-aesthetics through use of natural materialities in the display and exhibition design, for example, through the use of soil or wood, as well as a similar eco-tonal colour palette of greens, browns and beiges. Was the current curatorial turn the eco-cube?
In aligning with curator and historian Beatrice von Bismarck to acknowledge that the curatorial constellation of an exhibition presents physical form to relations of hierarchies, dependencies and privileges 4, these eco-aesthetics too render particular dynamics through their physicality. By that, it can be understood that one can cite particular dynamics through the materialities, confguration, and substantiality of a showcase. As such this text seeks to examine what relations manifest in the physicality of these exhibits - in the modes of producing and utilising eco-aesthetics - though also examine the physical positionings and orientations gestated, and how these afect matters of the exhibit.
In attempts to bring a natural appearance within the curatorial environment, I felt during my visits that there was an uncanny resemblance in these aesthetics. Te repetition and situatedness of these showcases, all of which I visited were in Western Europe, made me curious of the homogenous rendering of nature. A homogenous (re)presentation of nature: in reproducing an external Earthly landscape, were the physicalities of these exhibits in their eco-aesthetics simply doing their job so well that they were in fact mimetic of the relations and aesthetics of an Anthropocentric relation to nature? In their use of these natural materials, of their use value and performativity, these matters were acting their role as resource.
In a (fnite) material plentitude, how can the physicality and frameworks of the ecologically concerned curatorial embody the same atonement of its discourse?
Te ethics and relevance of these physical showcases presenting such eco-discourse, particularly in convergence with(in) art or design institutions as I will discuss in this text, have been much debated if sustainable. Te likes of T J Demos
[5] Te Politics of Sustainability T J Demos in Art and Ecology in Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 19692009. Ed. Francesco Manacorda // 2010 (Buchhandlung Walther König) pg 19
[6] Bodily Natures. Stacy Alaimo // 2010 (Indiana University Press) pg 1
[7] Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Astrida Neimanis // 2017 (Bloomsberg Press) pg 99
[8] Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Karen Barad // 2017 (Duke University Press)
[9] Ibid. pg 392-393
those close to the body and afar; to fnd kinship in what matters.
Tough not explicitly using the term matter-as-body herself, environmental and humanities theorist Stacy Alaimo in the previous quotation highlights a commonality of the bodily substances that make up the Earth’s physicality and materiality, inclusive of all biotic and abiotic bodies. She creates a unity through their similarity as bodies, over their diferences in attributes or properties. I have chosen to refer to matter, then, very specifcally as a body. In doing so, I endeavour to highlight not only its physicality as a body, but to also acknowledge its laminated and complex formation of self-actualisation, cultural and geo-political ongoings.
is one such critic, who has rightly pointed out the paradox of an eco-exhibition’s political and pedagogical position in its presenting of ecological discourse, whilst vastly contributing to an ever accruing ecological footprint. All, thanks to dependencies on transportation of works and displays, maintenance of exhibition environments, and amassing promotional materials.5 Te list becomes never ending, to then consider the footprint of a showcase’s publics and curators, and those that aid in its formation and resonance, like its caretakers or technicians. Tis text does not contribute to such an area of debate, in the sense of curatorial logistic or operational matters (though what follows is without a doubt entangled with these). It does not inquire as to on what kind of transport or quantity of pollution is made in how materials enter an exhibition, rather, it asks how these afect the geo-politics in the aesthetic, epistemic and performative constitution of materials and their role within the curatorial.
In centering my concern and critique on the physicality of the curatorial, I have come to the term matter-as-body. Tis term has gestated from the thinking of material- and eco-feminist theorists, such as Stacy Alaimo, Judith Butler, Karen Barad and Astrida Neimanis. In its makings and ongoings, I compost their ideas on matter and bodies, of the ways in which these are the “vast stuf of the world and of ourselves”,6 and of posthuman and phenomenological thinking. In doing so I seek to fnd ways of bodily relation, of multi-sensory entanglements,
Matter-as-body does not seek to be a binary term by which to create classifcation. It urges for a particular collectivity between human and more-than-human bodies through the posthuman feminist move of both/and rather than either/or7, specifcally in this text through materiality and physicality. Using the notion of Karen Barad’s intra-action, a collectiveness persists not when pre-existing bodies of diference converge, instead in the relational exchanges and infuences these bodies have on one another across ever changing spatial and temporal dynamics.8 In its striving of togetherhood, matter-as-body looks to the ways in which bodies are collective materialities, in very literal ways of sharing corporeal and physical encounter, and too in a phenomenological sense:
Matter-as-body are the waters shared between Earth’s body and human body. Matter-as-body is where your tap water came from.
It is you drinking the water, and it hydrating your skin. It is you going to the bathroom, and fushing the toilet. It is where those waters will go.
Matter-as-body are the waters you will never know.
Matter-as-body is cyclical.
Matter-as-body are the moments you choose to recycle.
Matter-as-body are the times when you do not. Matter-as-body is the credit card amount of microplastic you ingested this week.
Invited as part of the curatorial, matteras-body seeks to unite components of its constellation and aforementioned dynamic relations through this intra-activity. Be they plinth or public, all materialise from one another’s convergence as material bodies. As Barad describes “mattering [is] about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.”9 In such a way, matter-as-body becomes a method through this text to analyse the current modes of ecologically concerned exhibits and curatorial frameworks, remaining fxated on corpo -
[10] From hence forth written
[11] Curatorial Materialism. A Feminist Perspective on Independent and CoDependent Curating.
Elke Krasner. https:// www.on-curating.org/ issue-29-reader/curatorialmaterialism-a-feministperspective-on-independentand-co-dependent-curating.
html#.Y74oo-zP1QI
(Written 2016 ~ Accessed 2023)
[12]Te Curatorial Condition. Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022
(Sternberg Press) pg 64
each connected to an ecological site discussed in the exhibit in the Netherlands. (Here emerges our accompanying soil and shell protagonists.) I questioned my own relation to these materialities inside the exhibition space. In these uses of material, what epistemologies and emergent dynamics was Have We Met (re)producing? Surrounded by such tactility, in any usual environment outside of the exhibition I had a diferent relationship to these materialities: one where touch did not feel so prohibited.
reality, physicality and the material.
Tis text is also a documentation of my process of beginning to understand matter-as-body and what it constitutes. I disclaim now, what follows does not form a model for the curatorial concerned with ecological discourse to become standardised by. In forming a frst analysis of the curatorial state through matter-as-body, I choose to orientate a critique of a specifc situatedness with the case study of Have We Met: Humans and Non-Humans On Common Ground10 - a presentation showcased in 2022 at the Triennale Milano International Showcase [see Figures I - IX.]
By limiting my case study to Have We Met, I endeavour to be able to more precisely examine matter-as-body within a particular kind of exhibit and curatorial framework. By this, I mean an exhibition with ecological discourse, moreover a showcase where materiality plays an integral part in its physicality and display. In what curatorial theorist Elke Krasny would describe as curatorial materialism, Have We Met presented an awareness for the material interactions in its presentation. Krasny describes this materialist approach as taking into account “relatedness to the world as way of producing, including the production of new epistemologies and emergent histories”11 by the curatorial. I was struck by its materiality during my own visit to Have We Met in August of last year. Examples included the mass of shells used as fooring, and soil that had been used to prop up iPad display monitors,
Trough matter-as-body I also aim to refect on what gestures are solicited from the physical confguration and materialities of the curatorial, on the roles aforded to actants and why. To do so aims to assess how the entanglements of the aesthetic, epistemic and performative constitutions of an exhibit are produced not only in material choices of the curatorial framework, but acutely in the placements and positions of how materials are used, and the ways these produce interplays of actants in the exhibition. As von Bismarck notes, “Presenting means deliberately establishing relations of perception.”12 It is also for this reason I will analyse the commonplace ocularcentrism of curatorial modes and normative proximities and perspectives aforded by typical exhibition design, in search of more multi-sensory approaches so as to not form a binary of how bodies register knowledges through singular senses alone. Moreover, with myriad forms of ecological and geo-political conditions, I ask what becomes at stake for ecological discourse if fxated on what can be seen when so many take such manifold difering forms, and, in fact, many are without perceivable trace.
Tactility and touch persist throughout the upcoming text, led by my refections and analysis of Have We Met, as well as my own bodily hermeneutics and relationship with materiality. What might haptic registries ofer in multi-sensory modes of knowledge exchange? Seldom invited by the curatorial, the sacrality and power of touch emerge in confict with the practicalities and traditional values of exhibitioning, highlighted by the recent Just Stop Oil protests within art institutions. On the other hand, touch in its registries can be used as an invite or aid in checking in on the condition of another as a radical act of care.
In a material plentitude of bodies, it matters how we act as kin.
MATTER-AS-BODY
[Figure I, II & III]
Have We Met : Humans & Humans On Common Ground.
Dutch Pavillion showcase at XXIII International Exhibition
MATTER-AS-BODY
[13] Te Curatorial Condition.
Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022 (Sternberg Press) pg 13
[14] Ibid. pg 14
[15] It will become evident to the reader that throughout this text, I speak much more of the display and neglect to mention other roles and aspects of the curatorial such as the artworks in great detail. I do not do so because they are not integral to the formations of exhibitions, nor exempt as matter-as-body. I just make emphasis here that in discussing the physicality and materialities of the curatorial, I hone my critique in this text specifcally in the realm of exhibition design, physical structure and display.
[16] Have we met? Humans And Non-Humans On Common Ground - Triennale Milano website. https://triennale. org/en/events/netherlandshave-we-met (Written 2022 ~ Accessed 2023)
[17] Te Zoöp Model is based on the premise that the global climate crisis and ecological devastation are the efects of an economic system that has systematically put human interests above non-human interests. More info ~ https://zoop. hetnieuweinstituut.nl/zoopmodel
How does one act in the curatorial? It depends on the role assigned. In the sense of what is meant by role here, I heavily lean into curator and professor Beatrice von Bismarck’s understanding of the curatorial situation as a performative practice.13 In the ways the curatorial collates a momentary representation through presentation, performativities of various dimensions are enacted. Te showcase in its physical semblance performs to its publics. Tough, too, are its publics and plinths performers.
As with all performances, inherent hierarchies deem certain roles as auxiliary allowing others to become spotlighted at centre stage. Moreover, in its “becoming-public”14 all actants experience an exposure in their guise and exchange with one another. To review the conceptual and facilitating identities of the physical curatorial elements of Have We Met with regards to matter-as-body, body politics are foregrounded. As such, this chapter interrogates normative performativities of bodies generated by Have We Met’s curatorial invitation of its materialities and their roles. Te performative gestures of a plinth and its kin become aid in revealing the geo-political dimension of an interplay with materials, both internal and external of its domain.15
Have We Met: Humans and Non-Humans On Common Ground was presented at the XXIII Triennale Milano in 2022 - the showcase for the Dutch Pavillion in the international presentations. Te showcase’s curatorial text described its aim as exploring “what attitudes, organisational tools and technologies are necessary to recalibrate the relationship between humans and non-humans.”16 It built on the organisational model of the Zoöp 17, with whom the exhibition had collaboratively developed, alongside the Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Tirteen works presented various technologies and methodologies for convivial approaches to multi-species living. Of which, related to three ecological sites in the Netherlands - an urban garden in Rotterdam, a regenerative farm in the east, and an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea.
In its physicality and display, the exhibition designers Studio Ossidiana - a Dutch studio focused on material research and development - used materials in such a way to make site specifc references to these three locations within the exhibit. Each cluster of tables were made of a composite terrazzo material linked to the respective garden, farm and oil rig: made with wood, mulch and charcoal; clay; and shells. In addition, piles of soil or sand propped upright monitors on the tables depending on location. Te exhibition sought to be mimetic of the ecologies it was discussing through materiality. It created a skeuomorphism, afording visiting publics who had very unlikely been to those specifc sites themselves (due to the geographical distance between the ecological sites in the Netherlands and the showcase in Milan)
[18] Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology.
Astrida Neimanis // 2017
(Bloomsberg Press) pg 99
[19] Ibid. pg 68
[20] Te Curatorial Condition.
Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022
(Sternberg Press) pg 55
[21] Ibid. pg 139
As such, I return you to the shell and soil with you. Trough sensing (what kind, I leave up to you) what associations do you have with them? How well do you know these matters? How familiar are you to one another?
In their presence can you imagine the ofshore oil rigs in the North Sea and intertidal zone, or the regenerative farm? Or even the physicality of the exhibition I am discussing, and how their presence afected the display there? How does it afect the way you imagine these sites when I tell you that the shell is, in fact, from the intertidal zone with the North Sea in the Netherlands, and that the soil is from the exact regenerative farm that the exhibition discusses?
An ethics here emerges, twofold with the ecologically concerned discourses of Have We Met, in regards to material extraction and displacement. In Have We Met it is not documented where the materials used in the display were sourced from. Tat said, one can speculate that in being presented in Milan, Italy, at such distance from the ecology sites in the Netherlands, dynamics of the curatorial such as budget and procurement made it very unlikely they were from the sites themselves. Instead, they may have perhaps been sourced from a closer site in Northern Italy, or, in a much more likely scenario, were acquired from a hardware store.
to make associations through its matter.
In its forming of links to external sites, the curatorial here in Have We Met relied on its visiting publics having had previous encounters with such substances. Within her practice of posthuman feminist phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis avers that for ideas of what constitutes matter to take hold, we must frst be “somehow materially in contact” so that our “own bodily embodiment [soak] up and [hold] traces”18. I mention this here towards my point for two reasons:
(1) Associations with materials require previous contact: the ability for the soil or sand or wood, or whichever material of Have We Met to evoke a sense of another locality external to itself, are constituted through the encounters its publics already have with them prior to visiting the exhibit. It relies on the publics having previously come into contact with these substances before entering the curatorial, to be able to see the shells and think of the sea and intertidal zone, or soil and connect this to, in this case, agricultural landscapes.
(2) Tat embodied traces are materially discursive: for it is the corporeality of the soil, shells, wood, etc., and that of the visitors that aford such associations. With previous encounter and registrations of these matters, publics are able to recognise them through their corporeality, via sensorial registrations of their body through the gestures and attributes of another’s body.
Ethical tensions of the epistemic and aesthetic values of these materials in their origin and ways of entering the curatorial domain relate to the two previous thoughts in regards to posthuman phenomenology. Can these materials truly make reference to a site from which they are not from, if they do not have bodily traces of the situatedness of these sites? Can another matter, though sharing acutely similar attributes, be used instead of the original matter without consequence… conceptually or ethically? Have We Met’s use of the material takes advantage of a commonality of matter, whereby, in this instance, shells and soil from diferent localities share traits of similar morphologies and gestures. Trough the understandings of posthuman gestationality, fecund ways of thinking of matter could aford this to be possible in a phenomenological commoning of matters. However, as Neimanis states “matter repeats, but always diferently”.19
Trough their “assembling, inviting, and hosting”20 by the curatorial, how these matters enter the curatorial exhibit pertain to von Bismarck’s theoretical framework of the curatorial’s hospitality. In her expansion of what constitutes this framework, she describes how acts of care and encounter are intermeshed in the generosity aforded to how actants enter the curatorial inextricably tied to “entangled relations of power and knowledge”.21 By this, in the customs and modalities of the curatorial admitting actants to enter its domain, the curatorial fosters a power dynamic in its decision making of what actants enter
[22] Te Curatorial Condition. Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022 (Sternberg Press) pg 139
[23] Bodily Natures. Stacy Alaimo // 2010 (IndianaUniversity Press) pg 18
[24] Bodies Tat Matter: On Te Discursive Limits of Sex. Judith Butler // 1996 (Routhledge Classics) pg 41
[25] Ibid. pg 59
[26] For more see Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Tings by Jane Bennett // 2009 (Duke University Press)
[27] Te Curatorial Condition. Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022 (Sternberg Press) pg 16
[28] Te Curatorial Condition. Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022 (Sternberg Press) pg 55
[29] For more see Exhibition, Design, Participation. ‘an Exhibit’ 1957 and Related Projects. (Ed.) Elena Crippa // 2016. Part of Exhibition Histories with Aferall Books. (Koenig Books)
and how. In both circumstances, the power relation is in favour of the human actants.
Von Bismarck discusses that there is a responsibility to acknowledge that an invitation is “immanently ethical by defnition, refect[ing] aesthetic, social, political, and economic lines of force that run through the curatorial constellation and that are responsible for the shape and impact of relations.”22 From a environmental justice perspective von Bismarck’s thoughts here echo what Stacy Alaimo writes of an “unrecognisable sort of ethics emerg[ing]”, “one that demands that we inquire about all of the substances that surround us, those for which we may be somewhat responsible.”23 As such, refecting on the geo-political responsibilities of the curatorial invitation, the gestures of these materials could be conceded as bound with bodily traces of resource, in human activity and interplay fused as part of their morphology in their extraction and displacement. Were these materialities invited into the curatorial as materials as themselves, or for their properties?
As a reminder that I understand throughout this text matter as a body, the previous ethical refections bring forward body politics in regards to representational identity of bodies and subjection of their matter. As gender studies theorist Judith Butler writes in Bodies Tat Matter, “Materia in Latin denotes the stuf out of which things are made, not only the timber for houses and ships but whatever serves as nourishment for infants: nutrients that act as
extensions of the mother’s body.”24 Butler brings attention to a heteronormative representation of a dutiful feminine body ofering their breast milk to their children, of which, Mother Nature in a similar ilk has been represented as ofering their material substances of the planet in favour of human consumption. Neither I, nor Butler, subscribe to such representations as true, instead understand they are constructions of cultural making, as Butler discusses densely in Bodies Tat Matter. In questioning the norms produced of and for bodies they ask, “What is meant by the imaginary construction of body parts?”25 If heteronormativity interprets corporeal attributes as to render frstly bodily identities of sex and gender, and that in turn prescribes bodily performativities as result, could a similar thinking be used in relation to matters of the Earth, and their performativities? Towards the relations made in Have We Met when using the soil and shell in such a way, it is about their collective morphologies that render their identities. Tey are idiosyncratic in their ontologies as specifc abiotic matter, though not regarded as such in the nuance of their specifc individual bodies, rather grouped by common bodily appearance.
It is important to note I understand matter-as-body as agential, attributing its own performativity through its own historied ongoings.26 Formed intrinsically through self-actualisation. Tough, have mentioned the above to put forward that at stake in its subjective identifcation are intermeshed hierarchies and power dynamics in the human constructed ideas that deem these matters as not fully themselves; their guise and recognition are formed externally of their body and in this curatorial setting perform as another.
To add to this, how might the positionality within the curatorial’s constellation also afect the material’s performativity? Its gestures in performing as a plinth and its kin - in the very matter of Have We Met such examples being the table compositions, piles for monitors to rest upon, and fooring - are falsely deemed as auxiliary. In the state of becoming-public, they do appear as themselves insofar as their registrations are that they are soil, wood, and shells. In their roles as supportive elements of the curatorial, they, however, assume another identity appearing “as something”.27 As plinth or pile, they become subordinate through the traditional hierarchies of exhibitioning, whereby artworks hold the greatest value, and the least its infrastructure, in regards to manifesting discourse. Von Bismarck in her texts discusses how several exhibitions have warped such normative exhibitioning hierarchies, whereby plinths and partition walls were the only elements of the showcase. Without artworks, they acquired a more superior guise.28 Furthermore, it is integral to note the additions to curatorial and exhibiting discourses (at large, and in the unique exhibits themselves) that the likes of Lina Bo
Bardi, Celine[30] Te Curatorial Condition. Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022 (Sternberg Press) pg 33
[31] Ibid. pg 34
[32] A Billion Black Anthropocenes, Or None. Kathyrn Yusof // 2018 (Minnesota Press) pg 105
Condorelli and Frederick Kiesler, and the physical and material qualities they use, bring forward as to how exhibition design and display are fundamental in aiding discourse.29 Tough I still persist in Have We Met, the use of these matters in such roles adhere them within normative curatorial frameworks, to say, their gestures as themselves become entangled with those of plinth or pile in supporting role of the exhibit, both physically and metaphorically.
Von Briskmarck writes that power dynamics in the curatorial are “attributed to the constellation as spatiotemporal composition”30 and so are “subject to shifs in those relations with corresponding impact on properties and functions.”31 I invite you here to spend a few moments moving and positioning the piece of soil and shell around where you are reading. How do they difer if placed on a surface, or within their designated holes in their publication? On the foor, high up, leaning against each other or another matter, even slot into a small space, what about them changes? Do they, with each new position, still make reference to the ecologies from which they have come from? Is it necessary that they do?
In its use of the material-semantic and -somatic densities of the matters, Have We Met in its eco-aesthetics aims to reinforce their ecologically concerned discourses through its display, yet laid within the histories of the soil and shells, against backdrop of green and beige felt fabrics, its morphology bestows on its surface an idyllic and luscious representation of nature. In its invitation and ongoings as display, Have We Met shapes a relational dynamic between humans and these earthly materials with the latter as other and subordinate; the bucolic appearance shifs to uncanny eco-aesthetics more akin to green rhetoric and nature capital. As professor and author Kathyrn Yusof describes, a “constitution of our bodies to the practices and aesthetics that fuel our consumption and ongoing extraction”32 enacts a paradox through speaking of conviviality and utopic presentation of nature, yet remain entangled to Anthropocenic praxis in its modes of presentation. What matters are their identities and roles formed in human centric use value… not when they act solely as themselves. Echoes of T J Demos’ contradictions of the eco-exhibit persist; pressing are the sensitivities as to how and why matters enter the curatorial, if we, as humans, are justifed in continuing to invite them.
[Figure IV & V]
Have We Met : Humans & Humans On Common Ground.
Dutch Pavillion showcase at XXIII International Exhibition
[33] Te Curatorial Condition. Beatrice von Bismarck // 2022 (Sternberg Press) pg 80-81
[34] Ibid.
With manifold forms of climatic conditions, the curatorial’s fxation on presenting discourses through predominantly visual modes seems strange. From the air pollutants and greenhouse gases invisible to the naked eye, to the many unseeable health conditions of human and more-than-human bodies caused by geo-politics. A demand for multisensory modes advances to ensure a comprehension discourse highlights all aspects of the ecological circumstances of our planet, as well as aford access via polymorphic registry of these to a wider audience of publics.
Whereas the last chapter discussed the gestures of Have We Met’s materiality and physicality in regards to representational performativity, this chapter will look at its composition and “transposition”33. For Beatrice von Bismarck, transposition relates to how the curatorial constellation creates movements and shapes of interplay in its actants. In very physical terms, these may be the routes and wayfndings of the showcase as orientating a visiting publics body, or modes of transferring knowledges.34
Tough not the same as visiting the showcase oneself and understanding its spatial dimensions with one’s own body, I include the technical drawing of the exhibit layout of Have We Met [see Figure VI], to beneft you as reader with some sense of its arrangement and scales, in addition to the images of the showcase included in this booklet.
In regards to how Have We Met’s physicality afected modalities of knowledge exchange, it remained archetypal in exhibition format predominantly reliant on visible means. Visiting publics were presented with information boards used to put across the discourse and intentions of the showcase, as well as visual based works: such as visual-data and video pieces displayed on monitors, a unique text work positioned high reading: ’WATER HAVE NO ENEMY. ENEMY HAVE WATER’. Other works were to be understood through sight alone, such as object-based works contained within plastic and glass vitrines. [See Figures VII, VIII & IX]
In compliance with normative ocularcentric methods of the curatorial, Have We Met necessitated from its human visitors an ability of sight for their understanding. Te ocularcentrism was not only evident in the visual and text based works, but in the gestures of the small vitrines to contain works. Tese containers of the work requested a safe keeping of the objects within, thus determining the internal contents as delicate, and in such a condition that external factors may cause damage. A determined physical barrier was formed, requiring audiences to interpret the object inside through their gaze alone.
In doing so, the curatorial created multiple gestures as to infer a prohibition of tangible exchanges with
[35] Fundamental of Exhibition Design // An Intimate Journal For Advertising Production Managers, Art Directors and Teir Associates.
Hertbert Bayer // 1940. pg 23
[36] Inside Te Chimera
- An interview with Studio Ossidana. https://triennale2022. hetnieuweinstituut.nl/sites/ default/fles/inside_the_ chimera_-_an_interview_ with_studio_ossidiana.pdf
// Interview recorded 2022 ~ Accessed 2023
[37] Bodily Natures. Stacy Alaimo // 2010 (IndianaUniversity Press) pg 71
[38] Ibid. pg 72
[39] For more see Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology Afer afer the End of the World. Timothy Morton // 2013 (Minnesota Press)
[40] Ciara O’Connor: ‘Te day I became an accidental activist’. Independent.ie Newspaper Online https://www. independent.ie/style/voices/ ciara-oconnor-the-dayi-became-an-accidentalactivist-38412857.html // Written 2019
the works beyond sight. Either by not ofering them in the frst instance, with the likes of the video, pictorial and text based elements, or eliminating such convergence with a physical barrier. Normative behaviours of what is expected of a visiting human-body within the curatorial persisted.
In such articulation, the curatorial of Have We Met defned itself as made for viewing gaze, adhering to Herbert Bayer’s notion that, “the exhibition space is available to the individual eye and should obtain its form from the qualities of the eye itself”.35 Although corporeal as one of the senses of the body, in its majority of works and knowledge exchange via sight, a prescriptive curatorial gap between said observer and observed is maintained.
Te peculiar consideration that in using these traditional modes, Have We Met made it less apparent that haptic interactions were in fact encouraged; its exhibition designers had intended for the showcase to be touched. In an interview with the curator of Have We Met, Ellen Zoete, and the exhibition designers Studio Ossidana they relayed that, “Te materials invite you to touch them and sit on them.”36 During my own visit to the exhibition, I personally did not see any visitors engage in such a way with the materialities, rather, I saw the usual body language of exhibition goers with
hands entangled behind their backs. Nor did I myself feel compelled to engage with the showcase other than through looking. Surrounded by a plentitude of tactile matters, I did not sense an invitation of touch.
Tough not experiencing it myself, it is interestly to know this was the intention of the curator and exhibition designers when including these matters in the showcase’s display. Tat said, I refer back to the last chapter, where the positioning of such materialities as part of the display render them as auxiliary. I would put forward with works and discourse in Have We Met focused on its understanding via the normative modes of visual-based exchange, any urges to engage haptically with the materialities, to reach out and touch it, are superseded by the dominant gesture prohibiting touch by the prior. As fooring, table tops and supportive piles to monitors, the curatorial choice of positioning them in conservative confguration inadvertently warded of tactility.
It was during my visit to Have We Met that I imagined how its modes were honing my understanding of the current ecological condition. Surrounded by ocularcentric presentations of ecological conditions and narratives, as I had been in all the other exhibitions I had visited, I wondered if this correlated that I was more attuned to using this sense in environmental registry outside of the curatorial domain.
In remaining too reliant in its presentations of ecological discourses on the visual, was the curatorial encouraging that “seeing is believing?”37 In its repeated use of visual based works and knowledge exchanges, could it be argued then that if curatorial frameworks are steadfast to optic knowledges, in turn, they hone their visitors’ gaze (and their own) towards ways of perceiving ecological crises discerned primarily through sight? Stacy Alaimo alerts us to the fact that, “many [environmental justice] problems cannot be visually discerned nor photographically documented.”38 Of course in many instances, as Alaimo attests, visual documentation can provide irrefutable proof of ecological conditions, however they are not enough to be able to register all ongoing environmental states. Moreover, when vast ecological conditions and crises remain on such large scales, even if visibly perceivable, their phenomenological vastness makes it difcult to truly have full perception at one given spatial or temporal moment.39
It is here I also wish to discuss the issues of ableism that arises from the current modes of the curatorial. Again, in considering all of this through the lens of matter-as-body, I wish to consider how the physicality of Have We Met may be following standardised bodily registries of discourse, together with inciting a homogenous body access to its discourse. Such refections on the exhibitions with ecological discourse have already been considered, with the likes of journalist Ciara O’Connor pointing to this
[41] Online Lecture: Defning the Body: Climate Art and Queer Ecology as part of Art History Lucy Branchfower in Climate Change: Day 1. Courtauds Art Institute
YouTube Channel // 2020
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=I4SmoFT9EHw
[42] Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Towards an Eco-Crip Teory. Ed. Stacy Alaimo, Sarah Jaquette Ray // 2017 (Nebraska Press) pg ix
[43] Notes Towards A Politics Of Location (1984) in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose. Adrienne Rich // 19791985 (Norton Press) pg 210
issue afer visiting Olafur Elliason’s In Real Life at the Tate London in 2019.40 Physically disabled herself, O’Connor was unable to manoeuvre around the exhibition and its works in her wheelchair, leading her to feeling isolated and divorced from its ecologically-oriented discourse. Her non-abled body was excluded in the atoning and reparative public participation of Elliason’s exhibit.41
In light of this, the physicality of Have We Met also excludes certain bodies. In its use of shells in mass as fooring, it prevents certain visiting publics with physical disabilities from having easy mobility around the showcase. Tough too, in its maximalist use of numerous difering materials, high quantity of works, and kind of language use in its texts, the showcase also prevent certain publics from engaging - its stimulating physicality and rich linguistic discourse could halt those with cognitive disabilities or neurodivergence of inclusivity from full participation.
With the emergence of crip ecology in the last 10 years, many anthropologists and theorists are questioning as to why such political and ethical dimensions of ecological discourse have failed for so long to include disabilities studies. Both within discourse, but also in physical exclusion, from exhibition spaces to the landscapes of national parks.42 To invite such thinking into the curatorial prevents the rendering of a homogenous natural body. It ensures not to form a binary of its visiting human publics and their sensibilities to perceive knowledges, nor of the polymorphic ecological conditions of the planet. In reaching for multi-sensorial modes, manifold bodies must coalesce to produce and trans-navigate its discourse.
If then asked to start with the “geography closest in”,43 as Adrienne Rich suggests as a way of fnding a sense of belonging within the world, it must be acknowledged that there are as many forms and abilities of these bodies, emerging from the unique attributes of matter-as-bodies. In as many ways bodies emerge and produce knowledges, there are manifold modes in which they sense and exchange the world around them.
[Figure VI]
Have We Met : Humans and NonHumans On Common Ground Exhibition Layout. // https:// www.studio-ossidiana.com/ have-we-met
[Figure VII, VIII & IX] Have We Met : Humans & Humans On Common Ground. Dutch Pavillion showcase at XXIII International Exhibition
[44] Art fair visitor breaks
$42,000 Jef Koons balloon dog sculpture.
Guardian Newspaper Online // (February 2023) https:// www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2023/feb/19/ art-fair-visitor-breaks-42000dollar-jef-koons-balloon-dogsculpture
[45] cura in Latin meaning ‘to care’. Recommended additional reading: Radicalizing Care Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating. Ed. Elke Krasny, Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold & Vera Hofmann // 2022 (MIT Press)
[46] On Environmental Activism in Museums. Anne Bessette and Juliette Bessette. https://www.efux.com/notes/507828/onenvironmental-activism-inmuseums. // Written December 6, 2022.
If not through sight, what other senses may be used to perceive and interpret ecological discourses within the curatorial? Audio is one possible way. Or another, the lesser used sense of smell. Tese senses, as with sight, are such examples of senses that work in favour of the normative modes of the curatorial in regards to maintaining a distanced physical gap, so to say, they do not require literal fesh on fesh bodily contact.
Touch and the curatorial have a complex relationship; rarely permitted a fnger tip to tap matters of the curatorial in case of damage. (And who would wish to, if it cost $42k if you do.44) Touch, however, is integral to the making and care taking of the curatorial. It is not only in the ways that works manifest through various material and making processes, it is also, and yet easily forgotten, the ways these works are tended to in their transportation to and from exhibition sites, and that of conservation, cleaning and maintenance.
Te curatorial45 when in relation to the use of such abundantly tactic and desired matters, is, as previously discussed early in this text, thus entwined with geo-political violences of the extractivism. In this fnal chapter, I examine how touch could be one of many other modes in producing multi-sensorial exchanges of knowledges. Wondering if reducing physical gaps between curatorial actants aids in reducing ontological diferences, though in understanding lies within the nuance of haptic interplay as both acts of care and as ones perhaps more destructive.
In doing so I leave behind Have We Met, but remain with its matters.
Exploiting the sacrality of touch within exhibitions, Just Stop Oil’s environmental activist members attached themselves to frames or walls of paintings within large public art galleries [see Figure X]. Tese exhibitioning spaces were targeted by the eco-activists to condemn the hypocrisy that the conservation of artworks seems all too irrelevant when the ecological crisis is worsening (tenfold that the targeted institutions are funded by fossil fuel industries). Specifc works were targeted for their relevance to environmental depictions, such as John Constable’s painting Te Hay Wain, 1821, [see Figure XI] as well as the palimpsest of activist-artists targeting its bucolic natural landscape with iconoclastic remakes, such as removing its waters to highlight issues of drought, and even adding a missile to the contents of the hay wain carriage [see Figure XII]. Works were additionally chosen in most cases protected by glass, and precautions made to what glue was to be used to cause as little damage to the physical integrity of the works or displays as possible.46
Within the usual performativity and constellation of the curatorial’s actants, suspicious guarding invigilators ensure works and displays within exhibits are not touched by polluting fnger tips. In choosing to ignore this and the stanchion barriers, the contact between
[47] Bodily Natures. Stacy Alaimo // 2010 (Indiana University Press) pg 1
[48] Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature. Stacy Alaimo in Material Feminisms. Ed. Stacy Alaimo & Susan Hekman // 2008 (Indianna University Press) pg 238
[49] On Touching - Te Inhuman Tat Terefore I Am. Karen Barad in Feminist Teory Out of Service. Ed. Sophia Roosth & Astrid Scarder // 2012 (A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Vol. 23 No. 3.) pg 160
[50] Ibid pg 161
[51] Being in an Environment. Recorded online lecture by Andrew Pickering at the University of Edinburgh // 2014 https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=V9kCihpe1V4
[52] Cripping the Curatorial Hana Janečková in Radicalizing Care: Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating. Ed. Elke Krasny, Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold, Vera Hofmann // 2021 (Sternberg Press) pg 87
the activists and the frame becomes politically charged in the disruption of prescriptive relations and actions of the curatorial. Outside of its domain, the same connection does not take hold with such amplitude; touch in this case overrides the status quo of discourse becoming-public.
In sticking to the matter, touch in this case quite literally the “literal contact zone”,47 that Stacy Alaimo names as the site where possibilities for politics reside. In convergence of fesh and frame, the activists in glueing themselves to the Hay Wain aforded themselves the attention and time to corporeally and verbally protest for geo-political atonement. Furthermore, Alaimo inputs a movement across bodies that is not readily perceived through touch or haptic registry. Convergencies of bodies such as with unexpected chemical or polluting agents, in addition to the consequences of such an interplay manifest unexpected structural alterations as consequence of intra-acting bodies. Similarly to the issues of the invisible matters and ecological conditions as discussed in the last chapter, intangible matters are foregrounded, though out of grasp.
As such, Alaimo highlights there are ways in which touch can become action at a distance via “trans-corporeality”, the “time-space where human corpore -
ality, in all its material feshiness, is inseparable from “nature” or “environment””.48 As with a spectrum of ways one may register knowledges through all senses of the body, there are equally myriad modalities through haptic exchange that a Please Do Not Touch sign cannot omit.
Tough in sticking to the matter, touch is troubling. In both the case of the Just Stop Oil activists, and of Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, touching is in many cases without consent. As Karen Barad writes, “All touching entails an infnite alterity.”49 As such, creating an opportunity for the soil and shell embedded into this booklet if, and how, they wished to be touched becomes problematic. Lest should it be forgotten the subordination and exploitation of matter as resource discussed prior. In their becoming-public now, with you, these matters according to von Bismarck appear as something. Have the attempts to foster their presence to appear as themselves succeeded?
What Alaimo teaches us is that it is important to not think of these matters as banal in their touch either. Particles of soil have most likely disrupted your reading of this text. Even attached to your skin as you turn the page. Not to stress that these are particularly malignant either, it is to say that no matter exists without afecting or disrupting another.
With all that said, my wager is that posthuman phenomenology can ofer, in a composite with studies of feminist practice and care, possible routes in fnding how curatorial approaches could welcome touch in its exhibit. Barad tells us, “matter is condensations of response-ability. Touching is a matter of response.”50 In such a way, it may not be possible to ask in a frst instance if matters wish to be touched, but rather wait as to what follows afer a respectful touch is ofered. To take care through touch is to become acutely aware of the reply one receives through the connections and exchanges shared. How do you respond to the fragility of the soil breaking down with each turn of the page? Are you sweeping away the pieces, or are you holding this publication to carefully collate them within its pages? You might even simply ignore them.
In such a way, the curatorial as performance transpires as unscripted act of improvisational theatre, with touch becoming a possible wayfnder to understand the condition of another. It is a, “trading on the dance of agency.”51 With the body as a haptic technological registry, impressions of another’s state of health can be interpreted in the pressures and responses to pleasure or irritation. Hana Janečková in discussing touch in Cripping the Curatorial writes, “touch serves a receptacle and enabler of caring encounters, dismantling subject-object distinction (to touch is to be touched.)”52 She writes this in regards to those that may enter the curatorial and not possess their
own physical and mental autonomy. As such interdependence of others’ bodies can aford the acquisition of the knowledges and discourses, one not possible to perceive alone. Here touch becomes a route by which navigating the curatorial can emerge with matteras-body as guide or companion.
Of this, I am also reminded of Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action discussed in the introduction of this text. In the ways of reducing diference, laminated (em)bodied exchanges are what I hope for matteras-body in reducing physical corporeal gaps within the curatorial, they might too reduce ontological divides of a classical exhibition observer and spectacle display of the observed. Trough touch it could be imagined what political and ethical possibilities can emerge for the planet if we got a bit more hands on in caring for it.
IF GLUEING YOURSELF TO THE HAY WAIN IS YOUR THING MATTER-AS-BODY
IF GLUEING YOURSELF TO THE HAY WAIN IS YOUR THING MATTER-AS-BODY
In a material plentitude of the curatorial, matteras-body seeks for a physically closer, less enigmatic relationship of matter within the curatorial and exhibiting frameworks. It draws in close other bodies as kin, so as not to form an amalgamated body, instead that agential corporealities in the curatorial may move around, over, through, under, next one another.
Posthuman performativity shows that matters of the curatorial are not always as they seem. In bringing materials inside its domain, aesthetics take shape through the corporealities invited. In the case study examined of Have We Met: Humans and Non-Humans on Common Ground , its use of soil, shells and other abiotic materials are used as auxiliary in its display. In their positionings as fooring, table tops and other supportive elements, they act as normative exhibitioning furniture. In such roles, their gestures as themselves are skewed; a reconstruction of a humancentric hierarchy of matter as resource outside its domain is performed. Zeitgeists of the eco-cube and its aesthetics take an uncanny form.
Te ethics of the curatorial, particularly in those concerned with the ecological conditions of the planet, remain in perpetual paradox of themself. To behove the modalities more aligned to their discourse, it is integral that the sensibilities and responsibility of how matters are invited into the eco-curatorial bequeath less Anthropogenic practices. Both in their practicalities and conceptualisations.
At a time of ecological crisis and reparation, curatorial materialism most make the efort to fnd manifold modes in presenting the conditions of our planet. Already embedded by feminist and new-material contributions, this particular domain of curatorial practice and studies, I insist, must continue to refect on the dynamics of materials not only in light of their inherent political and economic relation, but of urgent geo-political matters. Response and its abilities comes to the fore; in bodies and their politics, decreasing the gaps between corporealities seems one idea for kin-aesthetics.
Proximities and boundaries of current curatorial modes may dislike this notion. As for sure its hierarchies of value - insurance policies, defnitely. Still, I attest touch could be one route of many multisensory practices of knowledge exchange. In materialising its speculations and ideas here on paper into actuality, I can even already feel a few of the problems that lie ahead.
Tere is no pun intended in saying touch is a sensitive issue. Honing practices of touch and care take time and patience, moreover are unique to each and every body.
In a material plentitude of Earth, of sundry bodies and traces, manifold bodies coalesce in a kin-aesthetics.
Tank you for reading this text. I encourage you to take some time to continue the sensing exercises mentioned, and ask you take care of the shell and soil in one of these two ways:
(1) Return them to their designated hole so they may remain for the next reader.
(2) Should you fnd yourself already travelling around the Netherlands to the west coast or north east, kindly return the shell and soil respectively to the site from where they originated.
For their kindness and care and critique, and the impressions lef on me in our conversations about bodies caring for bodies , I am grateful to Toni Wagner & Monja Simon.
I am deeply thankful to Miguel Teodoro for all the times spent together visiting exhibitions and talks, and the dialogues and comments shared. Your friendship means everything (as does your dislike for the common plinth).
And to Riccardo Petrini for the endless support, for the many debates on matter and materiality, I am grateful to have found a colleague and babe.
I thank all my fellow Geo-Design classmates for the laughs and support. To all those who gave their time in dialogues around this topic as it evolved: Julia Villard, Martina Margetts, Matylda Krzykowski and Astrida Neimanis. And to all my tutors for the provocations and guidance along the way.
Department Heads Formafantasma
Tesis Tutors Ben Shai van der Wal & Nadine Botha Project Tutors Giuditta Vendrame, Gabriel Maher, Metahaven, Irakli Sabekia