― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

INTRODUCTION

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai, the main character and narrator, explains to the reader that the story he will tell is more or less up for interpretation, because the facts therein are relative, depending on how they are told and by whom. In Genly’s example, the pearl becomes lustrous around one person’s neck and dulls, turning to dust around another’s. Here, it seems that the pearl reacts to its environment, that is, the body it is closest to. An alchemy is forged through the relationship between the two bodies. Analogously, Genly suggests that the truth operates in a similar way, where facts alter according to who tells them, when, why and so on.

I introduce my own document through Le Guin, via Genly Ai, because the passage so eloquently reflects a relational ontology. It destabilises the notion of indubitable, foundational truth – an inherently colonial concept (Escobar, 2018, pp. 85 – 88) – by taking into account the situatedness of each fact: the role its environment plays in how it is perceived. It is delightful that the agency of the reader is brought into the world of the book through the invitation to choose the fact they like best in times when they may be confused. I extend this invitation to you, my reader, in this document. In the same way that Genly’s story is not all his, this story is not all mine. There have been many interlinking voices, influences and events that have combined in their particular way to form this project. In an attempt to mirror these processes, I utilise a multitude of mediums, voices and places to share this research. If at times things overlap to the point of becoming confusing, it is okay to choose one path, or in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, choose one “line of flight” (1980/1987, p. 203) and leave the rest.

The goals outlined in the framing document (Ruzyczka, 2021a) are useful in scaffolding the focus of this discussion:

1. Through an embodied interdisciplinary performance-making process, research the affective potential of objects and how they catalyse the creation of a performance world.
2. Present a 30–40-minute performance that aims to disseminate the research findings of the embodied, interdisciplinary performance-making process through a live encounter with an audience.
3. Document the making process and performance through video, sound, writing, and photography to create a digital archive.
4. Through critical written reflection on the practical making process and in conjunction with the digital archive, develop a 15 000-word multi-media research explication that extends practical and theoretical knowledge around relationality. (Ruzyczka, 2021a)

Importantly, the research has gone through a shift that departs slightly from the multi-media focus of this report, as presented in goal 4), and thus must be contextualised. Connecting to the discussion Dwight Conquergood offers around performance research and “liminal norms” (McKenzie in Conquergood, 2002, p. 151), as discussed in the framing document (Ruzyczka, 2021a, pp. 14 – 16), at the beginning of the research, while I acknowledged that the research design of the project already enacted a liminal norm through its practice-led approach, I saw the potential to direct the question of liminality to the design of the research report itself. This was motivated by a desire to address some of the “epistemic violence” (Conquergood, 2002, p. 146), that “squeezing” (ibid) practical, tacit knowledge into a textual format often elicits (ibid). I intended to address through the creation of a multimedia web-based document that could effectively juxtapose text, video, image, and sound in the dissemination of the research.

I have come to understand that taking the research through an additional layer of inquiry around the design of its dissemination is a much larger question than I had initially anticipated and has proved to be outside of the scope of this report, necessitating the finding of a middle ground.  While this report remains predominantly textual, and therefore limited to some extent – in relation to Conquergood (2002) – it has become much more dispersed than originally imagined. The middle ground is as such: at various points in this document the reader is directed on a line of flight via a portal (a hyperlinked image) to specific archival materials in Memento in pieces. For each line of flight, instructions are given accordingly.

In the archive there are five main sections: the filmic interpretation of Memento’s performance, called MEMENTOagain, which is captured and edited by Evaan Jason Ferreira; a photographic collaboration with Alessandra Sarah Griffin, which investigates the assemblage and ambiguity between the objects and my body; a photographic documentation of the costume design; the original scores for the performance, which were mastered by Josman Parimaeker; and two reflective self-interviews that I completed after the performance process. For the most part, these archival materials remain “separate” from the report, remaining in the archive’s web page (and connected to this document via hyperlinks), but occasionally still images and/or gifs from MEMENTOagain are included here. Considering the active collaborations present in the archive, it is worth contextualising them methodologically, in relation to relationality (Escobar, 2018).

• Non-dualism: a position that is not grounded in dualistic metaphysics. Dualism (of various kinds) generally posits a fundamental separation of metaphysical substances, like, for instance, “mind” and “body” as two distinct kinds of things in the world, from René Descartes’ Cartesian Dualism (essentialsalts, 2021). Dualism also posits a hierarchy of substance, in which the aim or imperative is to transcend one to arrive at another – as in Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Realism (ibid). Alternatively, relationality does not rest on this kind of understanding of the world, but acts in excess of it (Escobar, 2018, pp. 95 – 96). Rather, it upholds a notion of “mutual constitution” (Sharma in Escobar, 2018, p. 101).
• Mutual constitution: A rejection of the “preexistence of distinct entities whose respective essences are not seen as fundamentally dependent on their relation to other entities” (Escobar 2018, p. 101) – and an embracing of a network-theory-type approach to ontology that considers the “role of interrelations in making up things and beings” (Escobar, 2018, p. 101). Escobar frames this according to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s concept of autopoiesis. According to them, an autopoietic system is “a network of processes of production… that produces the components which… continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and… constitute it… as a concrete unity…” (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p.79). Here, autopoiesis describes a self-producing system. Escobar also leans on Kriti Sharma’s notion of mutual constitution, that considers “viewing things at all only due to their dependence on other things” (Sharma, 2015, p. 2). In the words of Escobar, a relational ontology is one that considers the possibility that “nothing preexists the relations that constitute it” (Escobar, 2018, p. 101).
• Distributed agency: an anti-anthropocentric framework to understand world-formation that is not “the result of discrete actions by single subjects acting intentionally but largely the effect of complex heterogeneous networks of humans and nonhumans” (Escobar, 2018, p. 125). Distributed agency specifically de-centres the individuality of the human subject and our supposed ability to create our own universe (as if it was a matter of will, choice) – a framework that is offered by Escobar to understand how a pluriverse can emerge.
• Embodied reflection: the commitment to creating a continuum of “being~doing~knowing” (Escobar, 2018, p. 101) through what Francisco Varela, Evan Thomson and Elanor Rosch conceptualise as embodied reflection: the idea that reflection cannot just be on experience, but rather, “reflection is a form of experience itself” (Varela et al, 1991, p. 26). Embodied reflection is motivated by a commitment to unsettling the longstanding dualism of theory/practice that centres a Western academic tradition of thought-based knowledge-formation (Escobar, 2018, pp. 97 – 98). As Escobar states, “theorists cannot maintain both feet in the academy and purport that they/we are bringing about a different world; they/we need to put one foot in a relational world (or worlds)—to practice what we preach” (Escobar, 2018, p. 103).

How does Memento contribute to relationality, and how does relationality contribute to Memento?

The report is structured through four kinds of emergent research strategies that were developed through the practical research into object-affect, and the writing of this report. These I have come to refer to as: approximating, becoming-thing, excavating, and dwelling. While not referred to as such in the framing document (I only decided on their names after having completed most of the research), they are nevertheless methodologically contextualised in the framing document (Ruzyczka, 2021a, pp. 9 – 16) by Claire Rousell and Parker’s theorisations around micropractice (Rousell, 2016; Parker, 2020); Ahmed’s critical reading of Deleuzian becoming (1999); André Lepecki’s thought around things (2012); Ben Spatz’s understandings of embodied research (2017); and the performance practices of flamenco. In the making of Memento, each of the four emergent research strategies surfaced various interdisciplinary materials that can generally be categorised into physical performance, design (a combination of costume, set, props, and lights), sound, and text. These were assembled in haphazard ways in the creative process to roughly comprise three main sections of the performance of Memento, which I refer to throughout the document. The discussion that follows is presented in four parts, based on the aforementioned research strategies. Each part will briefly describe the research strategy, report on its relevant research findings, and extrapolate on their implications for the broader research interest of relationality.

[1] In the framing document presented at the beginning of this research (Ruzyczka, 2021a), the title of the project was Memento, communing with things: Exploring the affects of objects and their contributions to knowledge around relationality. While I value the multiplicity that the ‘original’ title contains, it is cumbersome, and so I have altered it slightly in this report.

― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You (2005)

APPROXIMATING / Deterritorialisation, touch, assemblage

In the prologue to the novel Broken for You, Stephanie Kallos describes a scene where you, the reader, are walking through a dark room full of unknown objects. What becomes clear in the “silence that is not quite silent” (Kallos, 2005, p. 1) is that something is happening outside of your perception, beyond your ability to comprehend, but nevertheless still operating of its own volition, and through its own logic. The unknown materiality of the objects and the other language they seem to speak – highlighted by “tongues that emanate from white clay…” (ibid) – suggests the nature of their existence beyond their relationship, or usefulness to humans. Kallos’ passage can be aligned with Bennett’s theorisation around a vibrant materiality, or the idea of “vital matter” (2010, p. viii). By “vital” Bennett refers to “the capacity of things… to act as… agents or forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own” (ibid). She proposes an understanding of a material as anything that has an “efficacy to do things, to produce change, to alter a course of events” (ibid). I springboard off Kallos and Bennett’s ideas to begin sharing the research of Memento, which starts with the research strategy of approximating.

Approximating is a type of practical research strategy that is most strongly informed by the concept of deterritorialisation in micropractice. Drawing on theories of deterritorialisation by Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), Rousell outlines a practical application of micropractice (Rousell, 2016, p. 9). One should “lodge oneself on a stratum” and “experiment with the opportunities it offers” (ibid). Here one identifies a starting point, a personal territory, a “received position” (ibid). Following this, one should “find potential movements of deterritorialisation, possible lines of flight” (ibid). Importantly as Parker notes (2020, pp. 42 – 44), these shifts are often embodied and happen “alongside and underneath” (Parker, 2020, p. 42) a broader macropolitics

I have named the strategy approximating for its Latin root, approximare: “to come near to” (Etymology online dictionary, 2021a). I found this appropriate considering my explorations of this strategy were primarily oriented around touch – I was almost always in physical contact with the objects. Further, the closeness implied by approximating also denotes a territory in the Deleuzian sense, specifically in relation to micropractice (Rousell, 2016, p. 9); a place to begin shifting from. Thus, it is sufficient to understand approximating as the close, physical, touch-based engagement with objects, informed by the methodology of micropractice, that seeks to explore various affective relationships between the bodies engaging.

The process of choosing the objects was divergent, at times being directed by the significance of an object in terms of its link to a person in my life, and at other times by an object’s interesting material qualities. The collection of objects that emerged included a ball of thick red wool, a half-inflated blue Pilates ball, a skipping rope made by my father, five 5-litre plastic water bottles collected in Makhanda, two tennis balls, one pink bouncy ball, an old teddy bear my mother had given me as a child, a packet of colourful plastic roses, five strings of plastic beads from an SPCA shop in Makhanda, a doll that reminds me of my grandmother, three pieces of bubble wrap, two wooden castanets, two red flamenco shoes and a long woollen scarf knitted by my mother.

To begin this research, I focused on building up a sensory awareness of the object’s materiality, seeking out all the characteristics I could interact with. I pressed, and squeezed, and lay amongst them. I threw them up and let them be. I wrapped them around my body and let them restrict me, and herein, a curiosity around the assemblage of my body with the objects emerged.

How do our forms create and destroy one another? How does that restrict, augment, and direct our movements in relation to one another, and in relation to gravity? Can we become a larger, less distinct body?

The wrapping framework was designed to be perforated, that is, to include fewer objects than would be necessary to hide my body completely, thus leaving gaps in the assemblage where limbs, or shoulders, and so on, could still be visible, and where the detail of some objects could be seen individually. I drew strongly on Lepecki’s notion of things as objects whose proper function has been evacuated (Lepecki, 2012, p. 77). Lepecki discusses two contrasting definitions of objects and things: objects are conceived things with a specific utilitarian purpose, most notably designed for the functional use of subjects (ibid), and things, or thingliness, happens to objects when they don’t, or no longer, serve a specific utilitarian purpose. Due to this loss of function, an object becomes “de-objectivised” (ibid) and is “let be” (ibid) as a thing in and of itself. In line with this thinking, in the wrapping framework, objects were bound in unexpected locations on my body. For instance, a shoe was placed on my head, a water bottle dangling from my hip, and the Pilates ball over my chest.

This investigation can be understood through Cull’s discussion around “creative constraints” (2012, p. 43), or “directives” (ibid) and their role in facilitating an imminent authorship to emerge. Cull describes this process in terms of a director-performer relationship, where a director acts not as dictator, but as “creative facilitator” (ibid). Directives are offered to the group, and “while instructive, [they] are nevertheless articulated in… [ways]… that leaves them open to multiple forms of response” (2012, p. 43, additions mine). The performers’ responses in turn offer their own directions for the work, and thus “…the response creates the directive as much as the other way around…” (2012, p. 44). In a slightly different context in Memento, the wrapping framework can be considered a creative constraint in which various events and responses can happen that work together to further the development of the performance. I think of this as a kind of autopoietic feedback loop of sensation and action.

I remember moments in the performance on the 26th of August when the light caught the plastic bubble wrap that was attached to me. I was taken by how it looked and moved – floating, soft. At that moment, I felt absorbed by the experience of the plastic. A moment later, I explored translating the floaty-ness of the plastic through the movement of my arms. I welcomed some of the plastic’s material qualities to be processed and assimilated into my own body, asking how I might become floaty, soft? This in turn created a series of movements that developed to eventually cause the plastic to fall to the ground, thus creating another event to respond to, which pushed the work forward.

Finestone-Praeg presents a critique of Memento, stating that “the central threads of relational response/activation in the work still largely reside with Julia as performer-creator in this iteration of the performance research” (Finestone-Praeg, 2021). She asks, “How is it possible to deepen or extend the performative presence and intention of the objects themselves? Is it possible to give them more performative agency to initiate listening, perception, becoming?” (ibid). I acknowledge this critique of the centrality of myself, Julia, which can certainly be understood via the above reflection of the work, especially in the ways the work is pushed forward by my agency, by my movement, and how I keep drawing various object-textures into my body. I note that while I am directed by the objects, primarily taking my movement responses from them (which reveals a level of subversion of my agency and impulses into the world of Memento), this object-oriented-focus and the performative material that arises from it is still primarily being mediated through myself and my body. I utilise these impulses to serve a function I am imposing on the objects – namely, the making and performing of Memento. This reveals a “manipulative subject” (Benso in Lepecki, 2012, p. 77). Further, as Lepecki states:

Within the performative cycle of Memento described above, there is a limit to my awareness of all that is happening in the wrapped, amorphous body-structure. This presents the potential lapsing of my dominant, manipulative subjectivity through a series of small transgressions by the objects. Sometimes they fall or do unexpected things that take me by surprise. This happened with the ball of red wool in the performance on the 27th of August, for example. It popped out much earlier than I was expecting and rolled completely out of the light. I experienced a momentary sadness because I felt the visual image of the wool was striking and presented many potential reference points for the audience – the loss of which was disappointing in the exam performance. This event became a reminder to remain present to the unfolding of the work in real-time, which was certainly valuable to me as a performer, but which points to something more significant in relation to the research.

In thinking about the ripple effects of the wrapping framework investigations in the creative process of Memento, the continually falling objects and their scattering across the floor began to call my attention deeply. As each object fell off, it individuated, drew attention to itself, and called for further exploration.

I found myself on the ground with the objects. Lying there, motionless. I think I was quite tired. Becoming-thing in some way? Plastic-bottle-bones- cracking.

Your body.

Its parts

Pressing, pushing, releasing

Pushing into floor,

Pushing into body

Parts pushing into one another, slowly,

Folding.

And what else is here?

Things spread out.

How can I know through touch, tension, pressure?

What does this feel like?

Do you want more, less, need less?

What?

Maybe a rest?

And what is that?

And that?

Drawing on an intersectional perspective, when beginning these investigations, I initially experienced them as conflicting. For context, I had not, at that time, sufficiently understood Lepecki’s differentiation between an object and a thing (2012), or at least how to embody that distinction, and so approached the (eventually thingly) engagements from an initially object-oriented perspective. Essentially, I began exploring a becoming-object, which in hindsight, was what was conflicting for me. I had a question around why I desired to engage in a becoming-object when being objectivised is a familiar enough experience for me, being a feminine-presenting person in a patriarchal society.  To this, I thought about Elizabeth Grosz’s critiques of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman as blind, in relation to feminine subjectivity, stating that a becoming-woman is meaningless to a woman in the same way that becoming-marginal (in any way) is meaningless to someone who is already marginal (Grosz in Cull, 2012, p. 18). In relation to this, I wondered what I would gain from engaging in a becoming-object, why I was drawn to it, and what it may surface in me, personally.

What I experienced through the investigations was both a kind of violence in the objectifying of my body, and a liberation in choosing to engage in this way. I asked what would happen if I just put aside the care that I usually hold towards myself. What if I turned up my pain-threshold and expected to be sore, bruised – even sought it out? What if I smashed my body into these objects, and let whatever happened, happen? Whilst this was painful, there was something liberating in the act of simply seeking out sensation, whatever form it took. What was liberating was the suggestion just to be within the experience of sensation.  The act of choosing to engage my body in this way became significant. I had the agency to engage; to “give oneself as a thing that feels” (Perniola in Lepecki 2012, p. 75), and stop if I want, which was empowering. It was at this point that I began to understand, in an embodied way, the differentiation between an object and a thing (Lepecki, 2012).

Exploring Memento in this way, the objects also became things that were no longer being used for the purposes they were designed for. They began to exist on the floor, alongside me, or caught up as another material, “vibrantly” (Bennett, 2010, p. viii) affecting other materials it comes into contact with. In this kind if thingly engagement, and the resultant relationships forged between us, there is an unsettling of the hierarchies embedded in the subject-object relationship. Previously described as manipulative, this centrality and dominance of the subject lessens to an extent. In the words of Lepecki:

It is possible to track the ways in which the hierarchies and dualisms in Memento are both affirmed and undone in various ways throughout the work – which I have begun to elicit in the discussion around Lepecki’s thingliness (2012) and which I will continue to do throughout this report as these opportunities present themselves. As such, it is not necessarily the intention of Memento to flip or undo any hierarchy between myself and the objects – to let the objects become the dominant forces within the work, for instance – but rather, to enter into various kinds of relationships with the objects and ask what can be learned from the interactions. The questions that become interesting, then, are centred around the relationships and what they elicit, which can more or less be captured in the following question:

How are we complicit in each other’s formation and destruction?

The explorations through the research strategy of approximating simultaneously generated sonic material in Memento, which evolved to become the pre-recorded soundscape for the first section of the work. I had in fact begun Memento thinking about sounds in relation to my flat. Becoming a collector of sorts, I walked around the rooms with my cell phone, recording snippets of objects I often engage with, including the bed, the fridge, the bathroom door, the ceiling fan. Explorations soon extended to places beyond the flat, including a rubbish dump. The squeeze, crunch and crackle of the plastic mountains caught my attention, which I recorded on my cell phone. I also became a collector in rehearsals, recording entire sessions which I would listen back to, to isolate interesting sonic engagements with the objects. As such, the development of the sonic layers of Memento began from a fairly dissonant and multiplicitous place, with source material that emanated from objects in familiar and unfamiliar environments.

At some point I decided to assemble these sounds together on my computer and rework them digitally. I lengthened some snippets, distorted others, overlaid other snippets and kept others in their original format. I worked fairly intuitively, experimenting with various sound effects, listening, adjusting, and continuing. When I had created a substantial chunk of sound, I took it to rehearsal and worked with it as another material, or “actant” (Bennett, 2010, p. viii), asking how it affects how I move, what moods it elicits and so on.

The sound, reflected and refracted from bedroom sounds, from bed sounds.

Warped, tossed, lengthened, stretched.

From soft arms and heavy hips, I begin to move with more jitter, more shake, more curiosity.

Fingers become alive,

searching for something outside of myself.

Shoulder listens,

responds.

Enveloping, folding, pushing, pressing.

I feel a little sick.

My stomach is pulling in, sucking in,

supporting my spine.

But my spine is shaking, loosening,

breaking.

It was a thickening of the air

(my eyes are wide open)

I cannot see myself on this screen.

What was a bed, an octopus, a story became a feeling, an embodiment.

Being born, little movements, feeling, sensing, responding.

My eyes are open and things have changed.

There is a turning, a moving…

(I couldn’t remember the bed)

Where at first, I remembered the bed, now I cannot.

A shaking, a flickering, on and off.

Flickering.

The light is flickering.

My muscles are flickering in the air.

In the sound

Pushed by the sound, making sound.

The first approach was to add large gaps of silence into the pre-recorded score, such that it would not make sense if played in isolation from the live performance. These gaps were intended to make space for the sounds of the objects and my body to be heard in performance. There were floor mics placed on the dance mats that further amplified these sounds. Here the possibility was created for live sounds to fall in the gaps of the score or overlay in haphazard and messy ways. Finally, the decision was taken to think of the score spatially. A sound designer was hired to master the score for the specific sound system of the performance venue.  After receiving the sound system’s layout, Josman Parimaeker combed through the score, and designated which speaker the different layers of sound would play through at specific times, based on his own readings, or experiences of what I had created. To amplify a relational ontology, I specifically asked him to bring his own sense of artistry, choice, and agency to the composition (personal communications, J. Parimaeker, 2021, May 18), being unwilling to dictate a process for him. As such the sound design for Memento emerged as a distributed network of divergent sources (some live, some pre-recorded), that was porous and moved in the space (to some extent).

What is significant for relationality about this emergent sonic process in Memento is the creative solutions found through having to navigate a static, and potentially dominant element in the work/world.  A distinctly “liminal norm” (McKenzie in Conquergood, 2002, p. 151) was cultivated, based on the logic of dispersion, or gaps and holes, as a strategy to destabilise and decentralise the staticity of the score. As is reflected by Parker:

Evening’s soft forgiveness of the edges of things,

budding purple birches, yellow willows,

and a still figure lingering in the margins.

Waiting fox, where are you going?

I hope back on the path behind you.

Nothing here is worth crossing.

Stay here, recede.

You might never have been.

I am glad you broke cover.

― Gabeba Baderoon, The History of Intimacy (2018)

BECOMING-THING / Materiality, movement

In the collection The History of Intimacy, Gabeba Baderoon includes a poem entitled The Edges of Things (2018, p. 51), which conjures a wavering vision of a “figure lingering in the margins” (ibid) of the highway, among “birches and yellow willow” trees (ibid). The figure’s visibility and movement are extended and experimented with: they seem to appear and disappear again, “recede” and “break cover” such that they ultimately “may never have been” (ibid). I include Baderoon’s poem here for the possibilities the metaphor of the “figure in the margins” offers. This discussion critically interrogates becoming-thing, as an embodied research strategy in Memento, drawing out various contradictory experiences that it elicited. Taking inspiration from Baderoon’s present, and simultaneously not-present, “figure in the margins” (ibid), I lean into the paradoxes that lie alongside one another in this discussion of Memento.

The research strategy of becoming-thing is an extension of the strategy of approximating and is also informed by micropractice (Rousell, 2016; Parker, 2020) and thingliness (Lepecki, 2012). In the framing document, this strategy was referred to as “somatic translation” (Ruzyczka, 2021a, p. 11), but, as it turned out, this was not the most accurate or descriptive term for the purposes. Nevertheless, the approach was framed as follows:

The curiosity behind this investigation began from questioning how I might alter the so-called “normal” state of my body in movement – alter the amount of tension and force, or pace, or pattern I usually employ. Towards this investigation I went about translating sensorial information I experienced from engaging with the objects into expressive drawings and words. After exploring the objects over a long period of time with little to no parameters, I chose a specific material quality for each object – for example, the shape of the wool or the sound of the crumpling water bottles – and tried to locate the exploration in something that presented kinetic opportunities. This may have been a part of the body, for example, or space, or time. Here the aim was to slowly build up a series of awareness points that could guide me towards building a movement language for the performance. The general framework I arrived at was:

• The shape of the wool (intertwined, twisty) – explored spatially through internal body patterns (kinesphere) and floor patterns (general space)
• The sound of plastic bottles (crack, shatter) – explored temporally through rhythm and phrasing (quick, unpredictable?)
• The weight of bubble wrap (light, airy, floating) – explored through force and muscularity (a weightlessness?)
• The shape of plastic flowers and the sound as they fall to the ground (core gently expanding, soft, plop, dry) – explored through the body parts of hands and feet
• The form of the Pilates ball (soft, plastic folds, yielding) – explored through the joints of the body (where can I fold?)

In another example with the wool, I asked how I might allow movement to travel around my body in spirals.

Intertwined pathways that make no linear-sense, remaining connected through a winding series of curves and circles. What is being suggested? The way wool wraps around itself, the way it calls things toward it.

Exploring the range I have, where are the limits of this investigation? How am I wool, and how am I not wool? I am concurrently reminded of the particularity of myself and my body.

How may I become unpredictable in timing? How may I crash and shatter my phrasing? Is there a way I can weave myself into the sound I hear, and back into the sounds I make in ways that take me by surprise? A rise and fall?

Where can my body fold? In knees, in hips, in elbows, in wrists, in ankles, in knuckles. What I might learn if I decided simply to fold my joints, allowing progressions from one joint to the next. How might I yield into the creases that my body can already do? How does it change how I move? My patterns, my tempo? Where do I go?

I see it opens from a central place. It is plastic, cheap. The edges are fraying. When it falls, it taps lightly on the ground, dry, a waxy leaf. It is held together by a plastic plug at the bottom, green, and I notice my hands can also open from a central point, my palm. My fingers are individuated, they can explore the space around them, can extend, just like the petals can. How may I do this plastic flower? Expanding from a core, of opening and closing, of dry tapping, of plopping. Hands and feet, how do you open and close? How do you expand from the core of the palm and the sole of the foot? How do you extend your exploration into the limbs? Where do we go? How do you plop? Tap? How are you dry, brittle?  A waxy leaf? A fraying petal?

To this point, and taking the example of the wool above, there are certain areas of overlap between the wool and me, or “zones of proximity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 306) perhaps in hair, or the way spine spirals, or how the ball and socket joints of hip and shoulder can rotate, which can constitute a becoming. Or, when I yield into the creases and folds that my body can already do, as a becoming-Pilates-ball, there is a diminishing of the self, of being, and a movement toward the imperceptible, as it pertains to my subjectivity. This might be understood in the way that Christopher Brunner speaks about submergence as a “strategic self-surrender that surrenders the self to develop a sensibility for the joyous play of forces undermining the apparatus of identitarian capture” (Brunner, 2016, p. 69).

Concurrently, there is also a limit to this self-surrender, which is located in the physical restrictions of the bodies becoming each other. Back with the wool, there is a limit to how far my body can spiral. I simply don’t have the same range and composition as the wool. In the same vein, the wool lacks the solidity and structure that my body has. As such, these boundaries become identifying factors that reinstate our individuality as distinct beings. This point is important and undercuts the possibly romanticised notions of becoming that may have been implied thus far. Ahmed’s words must be called forth. When it comes to the motivations behind why one might engage in a becoming, “…there is a rewriting of subjectivity through the other: the other becomes a means through which the subject announces its disappearance” (Ahmed, 1999, p. 56). In so far as I, Julia, am in dialogue with myself, I reify my subjectivity in relation to these objects through the very means by which I come to be in dialogue with myself. I use the otherness of the objects to understand something about myself – to motivate a becoming-thing that then pacifies and “commands the otherness of the other” (Ahmed, 1999, p. 56). Through recognition of this motivation and the power imbalance at play in the work, the perceptibility of the identities in relationship resurface. So, perhaps paradoxically, as one engages in becoming, that is, a movement toward a dis-identity of related parties, one’s identity is also simultaneously strengthened.

When it comes to the experience of witnessing embodied engagements with becoming, a different yet equally compelling paradox surfaces, which is located in the boundary between meaning and presence. To begin the discussion, one strong aspect of Memento centres a sensorial engagement with the objects that invites the audience to submerge themselves into the sensorial landscape and experience Memento in the “here and now” (Smit, 2021), or with “perception” (Finestone-Praeg, 2021). Memento is more biased toward this kind of engagement, being framed as a research project that is interested in the materiality of the objects. Indeed, many of the objects included in Memento were chosen for their interesting material characteristics: the bubble wrap for its lightness, its quiet popping, its transparency; the strings of beads for their soft tapping rustle; or the plastic water bottles for their malleability and loud crunch. As such, a strong interest I had in the making of this work was the development of a primarily sense-based world that could be experienced as such. I had no great intention to develop a thematic landscape. That said, I was not opposed to the emergence of signifiers in the work and the invitation they might present the audience for meaning-making. In fact, I was curious about the audience’s potentially divergent readings (as another element of a relational system). I prefaced this general approach to Memento in the programme note for the live performance:

There is a drought at present in Makhanda, which requires that running water be restricted to every second day. Further, municipal service delivery is inconsistent, which often leads to longer periods where running water is not available. Finally, the quality of the municipal water is not recommended for consumption. This situation results in the need to buy and stockpile water regularly, which is certainly how I accumulated the water bottles for Memento. Here, the water bottles in the performance are immediately indicative of the geo-political environment in which Memento is performed. Further, on a more microscopic level, when I contracted Covid-19 in June 2021 I began to accumulate these bottles much more rapidly, needing to drink more water than usual in order to recover. I would like to share a memory from one day in that period of isolation.

I had a delirious episode which lasted about eighteen hours. It began with an obsessive visualising of Memento, to the point where I got out of bed and pulled out all the empty water bottles and began rolling around in them on my kitchen floor. I was so out of breath, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

And all I could hear was the cracking sounds of the bottles. And all I could feel were the sharp, crunchy edges push into my skin. Crinkling and popping and bruising. And crumpling and shifting and scraping and scratching. And pressing and crinkling and bruising and shifting and scraping and popping and cracking and crunching and pushing and popping and scraping and shifting.

Thus, what is evoked in the relationship between myself and the water bottles is space for both a deeply thematic and emotive engagement with these objects and a deeply material one, which co-exist alongside one another. This multiplicity extends beyond myself as the performer-creator, and towards the audience, through an overflowing of potential signifiers, which remain open for interpretation (as Smit’s reading suggests), but in a way that is non-dictative. This is because Memento is concurrently an environment of sensation that invites the audience to simply exist in the presence of experiencing the work.

When using a relational framework, these overlapping or contrasting ways to engage in Memento (that may well be considered paradoxical, if using a dualistic framework) become multiplicities that present various kinds of relationship possibilities between bodies and things. Indeed, these can be experienced as conflicting and frustrating, but they can also be experienced as meandering, non-prescriptive, and even “sublime” (Smit in Parker et al, 2021). Further, these divergent experiences can be held next to one another through relational ontologies which seem to welcome alterity in ways that are generative, nuanced, and complex. As it pertains to the witnessing of Memento, Smit says:

In bringing this discussion to an end through the words of Finestone-Praeg, Memento “…was a marvellous experience, in the surreal sense of the marvellous as that which shocks us into a different relation or perception” (Finestone-Praeg, 2021). With reference to Louis Aragon’s declaration that the “marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within the real” (Aragon in Finestone-Praeg, 2021), through a relational lens, Finestone-Praeg delicately frames the work as a “sort of re-enchantment of the power of mementos to reconfigure memory as presence, or immediacy” (Finestone-Praeg, 2021).

The way that Memento has been crafted – to allow both the experience of meaning-making and of sensation – reflects a relational ontology that, rather than dictating to the audience, invites them to find their own pathway through the performance. It calls forth the agency of the viewer, and brings them, their stories and their associations into the world of Memento. Significantly, the performance offers various, potentially conflicting ways to watch, experience and read the work, which change and grow over time, but which can be held simultaneously, in overlapping ways. This is due to Memento’s commitment to non-dualism, which offers a pathway through potential paradoxes and into an unfolding of multiplicitous and divergent possibilities.

― Soyini Madison, The Dialogic Performative in Critical Ethnography (2006)

EXCAVATING / Memory, fragments, others

In her paper, The Dialogic Performative in Critical Ethnography (2006), Soyini Madison moves between academic and poetic voices to discuss the necessary relational awareness that she argues a researcher must develop and sustain. She includes the above line, which suggests notions of identity-as-flux. An image is conjured of a body becoming distorted and changed, adapting to external pressures, so much so that it becomes another body. As Madison suggests by “it is not just you anymore (it never was)” (2006, p. 323), perhaps we are always already becoming another body, always in flux, in change, and embedded in our environments. I hold on to Madison’s image and the relational ontology it implies as I engage in a discussion around memory, experience, and fragmentation.

This section is structured around the research strategy I call excavating – an auto-ethnographically focused approach to the research of Memento. It is motivated and informed by Ahmed’s (1999) critical reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of becoming as de-subjectivisation, or a movement toward the imperceptible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 280). Ahmed critiques the interest, or rather, “phantasy” of becoming imperceptible, or de-subjectivising, as revealing an embedded subjectivity “…that can move, that is unfettered, and that has the privilege of fluidity and transformability” (Ahmed, 1999, p. 56). In questioning the supposed ability of material to be separated from image, or of real to be separated from phantasy (Ahmed, 1999, pp. 52 – 53), she offers a reading of becoming, through her understanding of phantasy. Ahmed argues that, rather than simply being imaginary, a phantasy “traces the problem of how the relation between the ‘inner’ psychic field and the ‘outer’ external field comes to be determined as the site of instability and crisis” (Ahmed, 1999, p. 53). Arguing that becoming is imbued with an element of phantasy – that becoming is “always already an image of the otherness of the other” (ibid) – she etches out an understanding of becoming that “hesitates between the domains of the material, the imaginary, and the social” (Ahmed, 1999, p. 52).

In the making of Memento, I held onto Ahmed’s inevitability of the “image of the other” (Ahmed, 1999, p. 53) when engaging in affect and becoming, both for how it creates room for critical engagement, and for how it provides a looser, more variable, and arguably less binarised view of subjectivity. The insistence on de-subjectivisation in the “abstract line” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 280) presents a potentially problematic binary to subjectivity that concurrently delineates the boundaries of the exploration (what can be accepted, and what should be rejected) quite rigidly, as will be discussed in relation to my experience. Rather, in Memento, I wanted to engage in the various potential movements between myself and these objects, whether it be in the realm of the material, the imaginary, or in the realm of memory and association, emotion, and so on. I take note from another of Ahmed’s papers that appropriately frames my approach here:

Excavating is also derived from Athena Fatseas Mazarakis’ research around the self, memory, and performance, which I encountered in a practical workshop during an artistic residency at The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative in Mpumalanga in 2016. Treating the body as a locus of memory, an archive, we worked on loosening the frame through various shaking exercises. We also worked to identify areas of the body that were potentially dense with embodied memories, which was based on the premise of the “body as archive”, or a “body of knowledge” (Fatseas, 2009, p. ii), which I draw on for excavating. Much like an archaeologist might brush and chip away at the surface of the ground, in Memento’s process I brushed, chipped, squeezed, and pulled at the literal and metaphorical surface of my body, the outer shell, to try and loosen it to reveal something underneath. So, by way of arriving at a loose definition, excavating is an auto-ethnographically focused research strategy interested in eliciting memories, associations and self-knowledge through the activation of the physical body within, or in relation to, a particular environment or set of materials. Excavating produced significant text-based findings that were incorporated into the score for the last section of Memento. These will be the focus of this discussion.

When deciding to go along this methodological route, I imagined I would be excavating memories and associations directly linked to the various objects. I experienced challenges related to this, specifically when trying to elicit memories on demand. It seemed that the more I looked at the objects, asked something of them, the less they said and the more mentally blocked I became. After struggling for some time, I decided to take a looser, less pressurised approach, opening up to the possibility of memories emerging from physical explorations at unexpected times. Deciding not to stipulate timeframes, this turned out to be a more effective strategy. One evening in my flat, while exploring precarious balance by standing on two empty water bottles, I had a mental flashback to a day when I was about six years old. A friend, Daniel, and I were playing in a patch of ground in the yard of my family home. It was either raining or the hosepipe was running, and all the soil had turned to mud. We played for hours. In my flat, standing on the water bottles, this memory seemed to arise out of the blue – fragmented and primarily tactile in nature.

I remember mud

Sticky, cold, wet

The sun was beating down

Cool to the touch

It was hours and hours and hours and hours.

A quilt

Woven, scratchy

You, Gran, sitting, waiting, red

The weight of your body

Waiting

We spent a lot of time together while I was growing up. I called her Granny Krysia, but her full name was Krystina. We used to bake and garden together, and when I slept over, she would sit at the foot of the bed and wait for me to drift off. She let me sleep in her spot. When she died, she did so on her bed. I remember the family gathering around. We all held hands, prayed, sang, said a word and so on. There was a scarf wrapped around her head to keep her jaw from flopping open. I really loved her.

Through excavating, a body of memories began to emerge that became the basis for the score of the last section of Memento. I took time to write these fragments down and eventually recorded myself saying them in my bathroom, using the voice recorder on my cell phone. I had initially thought I was going to speak the words live but decided against that for various reasons – primarily because I felt there was more opportunity to play with the idea of fragmentation through a digital format. Listening back and working with the sound in rehearsal, I decided that I needed a sonic layer to support text. I had the inkling of a potential sound which was skittering around my brain, suggesting itself, but in an unformed way. A slight tinkle? Small clicks, clinks? I went around my house with a wooden spoon, tapping everything, listening for sounds that illuminated my nascent idea, listening out for the potentials of overlapping sounds. I finally landed on:

• Old wooden beads from a broken necklace that used to be Granny Krysia’s
• A small purple cup I had hand-painted
• A well-used wooden spoon
• An old plastic zip-lock bag
• The bathroom basin
• My mouth
• My hands

• Place the beads in the cup and the cup in the basin
• Also place the zip-lock bag in the basin
• Place the back of the wooden spoon in the cup of beads, whilst placing the other hand on the zip-lock bag
• Bring your mouth into the resonating bowl of the basin
• Explore swirling the beads with the spoon, while crinkling the plastic bag, while also mimicking and embellishing the emerging sounds you hear with your mouth sounds

At this point in the process, I had become quite clear on what the last section of the work was exploring, which informed how I thought about the sound.  As discussed in Approximating: Deterritorialisation, touch, assemblage, the last section of Memento was characterised by a curiosity around sensation, as driven by a sense of pushing, pressing, and squeezing my body into the objects. Drawing on this, the sound of the last section called for a stronger element to match the sometimes violent, sometimes naively playful quality of the object-body engagements. I opted for a series of deep bass tones that felt heavy and weighted. The intention was to use them to create a sense of pushing, squeezing, or squashing. I layered these into the score in inconsistent, unpredictable ways, aiming to develop a sense of constant shifting from underneath – perhaps as something felt under the skin?

The final layer of the composition drew on the sense of fragmentation that characterised how my memories were being excavated. Linking to this, I thought also about the strange assemblage of my body and the objects in the first section of Memento and was reminded of fragments, gaps, and loose ends. I leaned into what I began to perceive as an emerging logic in Memento and decided to explore it digitally, through a final manipulation of the textual layer of the score. I began by randomly cutting words out and placing them in other locations in the composition. Listening back, I would then make more edits accordingly, listen again, make more edits, and so on. What resulted from this process was a further fragmentation of the words that, at times, obscured them altogether. Here they became recognisably vocal but lacking in any overt or clearly intended meaning. At other times, words were able to be deciphered, which provided some potential signifiers, but these were quickly undercut either by the illogical words that followed, or by their juxtaposition with more overpowering sounds in the score.

Thinking deeper about the status of text in Memento, I found myself often approaching the material not as an assemblage of words that function to create sentences that makes sense, but rather, as an assemblage of words that function to create sounds. I noted that focusing on words-towards-sounds encompassed the potential of words-for-meaning and words-without-meaning: whether the sounds present could be deciphered as meaningful, or partially meaningful, or completely indecipherable, they were still sounds. I concluded that words-towards-sounds provided an open, relational framework that held a multiplicity of potential experiences, that did not exclude meaning-making, but could also operate in excess of it.

When does an assemblage of words transition from a collection of sounds into a sentence that can be understood in some way? And is there a possibility to slip in and out of these modes of hearing and thinking, and knowing? Is there a way to know something textual, in a non-textual way? How can words be sounds? Also, how can sounds become words, or rather, become reference points; become meaningful elements of a work?

I can hear a tweeting, birdsong in this sound. I am reminded of my Granny Cath. I have her name as my second name, Catherine. I am reminded of how she loved birds, loved just watching them outside her glass sliding door. Pecking, cooing on the bricks, in the small garden.  I remember a day we went to Zeekoevlei in Cape Town, birdwatching. She had on a brown hat. We still have that hat. My mom sometimes wears it while gardening; my dad wears it to work. The hat has little pictures of guinea fowls on the rim.   Sometimes, I see small birds pecking the grass outside my flat in Makhanda. I think about Granny Cath. Some of these little chirps have made their way into my composition for Memento. I wonder how others hear these birds? I wonder how others hear the other sounds too? What links are there to be made, what associations, memories, stories?

What strengthens this non-dualistic continuum is the extrapolation and application of the logic of fragmentation (emergent initially in the embodied excavation) to the digital elements of score. Finding ways to enact fragmentation through digital overlays, cuts and juxtapositions, the originally recorded sentences were further broken up. What resulted was the strong presence of gaps, both literally in the score, and metaphorically in the wavering perceptibility of the meaning of the text, that allowed a multiplicitous engagement with the composition. The act of opening up the potential function of text to include sense-making, but also to imaginatively consider its possibilities beyond that, towards sound-making, revealed a fluidity of meaning that welcomed a multiplicitous host of potentially divergent readings of the work. As such, this process in Memento offers a tangible, yet microscopic, example of how power may be navigated and unsettled – its boundaries questioned, pulled at, and potentially reconfigured.

― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (2004)

DWELLING / Immanence, the unknown

Jeff VanderMeer’s science fiction novel Annihilation forms part of The Southern Reach trilogy, in which a team of scientists go on an expedition into Area X – a coastal marshland that has become an ecological anomaly. Therein they find an underground tower whose walls are filled with sprawling text – a section of which I include above. What draws me to this passage is the framing of death as a passage into new life, yet known, and the suggestion of this journey as blissful. In Memento, the overall research process often followed a path from the known to the unknown, which is what I focus on in this last discussion. I draw on the metaphor of death, offered by VanderMeer, as a way to understand a process of letting go, to allow for a submergence into the research. I also consider what opportunities arise when one considers this journey might be as blissful as it is bewildering or affronting.

This final discussion focuses on the research strategy of dwelling, which use to describe an ongoing/global strategy that is implemented throughout Memento. It is improvisatory and denotes a sitting into, or inhabiting of the various worlds of Memento, and the research questions implicit within them, especially over long periods of time, and with little expectation for the outcome. This strategy is based on the flamenco attitude to palos, or song-structures, which operate like small feeling-worlds that musicians and dancers enter into, and which provide a structure for their relational engagement (Ruzyczka, 2020, pp. 9 – 19). It is precisely in the inhabiting of these palos, that is, embodying their rhythmic and mood-based specificities, that deep and nuanced connections between performers can be built (ibid).

Following this, what characterises dwelling is the inhabiting or enacting of research questions in Memento, and the sitting into the worlds that emerge from this embodied questioning. Further, dwelling is the action of engaging and re-engaging over long enough periods of time, such that something new is learned that was not apparent at the beginning of the exploration. Put another way, dwelling is the action of continuously and consistently holding the question contained at the core of a particular investigation close. Finally, dwelling tries to inspire a non-attachment to the outcome of the questioning as a way to keep the results as open as possible. As such, dwelling is not necessarily a research strategy towards generating performance material – as approximating, becoming-thing and excavating are – but a strategy to clarify and develop that material in the process of Memento’s world-building.

Each previous discussion thus far has ultimately presented research strategies and findings arrived at, at the so-called “end” of the research process (i.e. the time of performance). Little discussion thus far has focused on the processes of coming to/developing/clarifying those techniques – which were complex and emergent. This section seeks to address this to some extent, and in so doing aims to illuminate some of the broader kinds of research and thinking happening in Memento. This discussion expands on the idea of embodied reflection (Varela et al, 1991) and the continuum of “being~doing~knowing” (Escobar, 2018, p. 101) that Escobar argues is fundamental to relationality.  For this discussion, I rely on a performance-philosophy premise found in Cull (2012), that performance is a kind of thinking:

In Approximating: Deterritorialisation, touch, assemblage, a discussion was presented around the research environment arrived at for the last section of the performance: the sensorially-rich, thingly engagement between my body and the objects. I would like to track this process in terms of dwelling. As previously mentioned, the wrapping framework used in the design of the first section of the performance encouraged a fragmented engagement with objects as they fell to the floor and dispersed. This is how I found myself initially wanting to roll on the floor amongst the objects. At first, my engagement was predominantly task-oriented, based on the idea of gathering. For some reason, perhaps safety-oriented, I felt the need to have an outright imperative to begin this research. Becoming the seed of the research environment, the task simply became: gather the dispersed objects and transport them from one side of the stage to the other.

Most of this exploration then involved finding various ways to entangle myself with the objects so that when I moved, they came along with me. The question was something like: how can we entangle such that we move as one thing? At the beginning of this process, the gathering made sense to me as an extension of the ambiguous assemblages of the animate and inanimate. It also made sense to me emotionally, as a manifestation of the need for comfort. The task gave me a sense of safety and structure. All I had to do was find ways to enact the imperative. I spent a considerable amount of time exploring this task, and as I continued to dwell in it, a deep tension began to surface that began to unsettle the understanding and comfort I thought I had gained.

At first the tension manifested as a creative block and a diminishing of interest in the activity. I was becoming bored and tired with tangling myself up in the objects but couldn’t see a way out. Sitting in the frustration, I tried to solve it through addition by finding more and more ways to become entangled, not realising that what was required was a reorientation of the research questions. The significant experience that pushed me in this direction was the day of the Covid-19 delirium on the kitchen floor, described in Becoming-thing: Materiality, movement. Perhaps because the location was different (at home, not in the studio), or because I had spatial restrictions, or didn’t have much energy, I was able to uncover a different focus. I distinctly remember placing every water bottle and plastic bag I could find in my house on the kitchen floor and saying to myself, “Just be, just exist around and among these things.” In this way, the questions I began to ask were more towards, “How does this feel? How is this different from before?” and “What would it be like to just feel?”

Through this experience, I began to consider the possibility of this section of the performance simply being an investment in a sensory experience, but initially battled to come to terms with it as a valuable performative contribution. I remember thinking, “What would it be like to allow the audience to also just feel; just to look, to experience? What would it be like if they didn’t have to make sense of anything?” Luckily, around the same time I revisited Karol Tyminski’s performance Water Sports (2020). Online, I watched the performers immerse themselves in the watery, slippery, jiggly environment they had created, and I felt strangely peaceful, even sublime. Something about the way the audience were invited to simply witness the performers engaged in acts of sensation felt so simple, yet so intimate.  There was a complexity of feeling, of affect, contained in each successive moment of Water Sports and I found myself simply wanting to watch the way their bodies created ripples in the water; how they slipped and folded over one another. While I sometimes interpreted centralised thematic information emerging in the various scenes, I also found space for my own feelings, associations, and experiences to filter into the milieu. This sense of space, or openness that seemed to be left for me, a witness of Water Sports, became deeply validating, but also intriguing. Through this, I was able to think of the possibility of sensation in Memento as worthy and interesting, and wondered about its possibilities for creating intimate moments for the audience members to experience the work through their own landscapes of feeling.

In reorienting the focus of the final section of Memento, I rediscovered some curiosity and passion for what I had made, and how it would be received. At this point in the process (July – August 2021) sensation became the driving force for the end of the work and presented opportunities to live out the research questions in new ways. Perhaps unexpectedly then, considering this shift, I eventually decided not to let go of the gathering task that initiated this research journey (which I spoke about at the beginning of this section). While gathering as an imperative became secondary, it was not eliminated entirely. What resulted was the uncovering of a generative tension and conflict in Memento that became an important place of learning.

The tension that I felt as a performer was concerned with how to navigate the desire to simply be, feel, touch, and lie amongst the objects, and the imperative I had set for the work around the task of gathering. As such, while the process of coming to validate sensation for the sake of sensation produced a microshift away from the gathering task, the imperative never fully left. There was no tipping of the seesaw but rather a slow shift to some kind of middle ground that prompted a settling into, and acceptance of an underlying tension at the core of the work.

Dwelling facilitated a process of refining the practical, embodied questioning in Memento, which allowed me to come to ask the so-called “right” questions, or at least, come to identify the questions that had the most potential for knowledge-generation. Leaning into the areas of conflict or tension, the welcoming of dissonance became the most generative strategy for Memento, which in turn facilitated a rich environment for the critical theorising in this report. With reference to Cvejić’s method of developing “expressive concepts” (2015, p. 15 – 16): only through critical reflection and mental extrapolation on what was “expressed” or practically “given” in Memento did I arrive at what I understand as the logic of Memento, or how it thinks.

Perhaps the strongest emergent concept immanent to Memento is the simultaneous presence of multiple, sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary phenomena, manifest in the constantly changing relationships between subjects and objects and between meaning and presence. This notion was developed through the reflection and analysis of the various research findings elicited by approximation, becoming-thing, and excavating, and their subsequent extrapolation in relation to the existing theory that scaffolds the work. As such, dwelling, which sets up the possibilities for this synthesis of practical and theoretical knowledge, also speaks directly to this report, being an integral part of its creation.

With reference to the importance Escobar places on embodied reflection as a necessary step away from the colonial binaries existing between theory and practice (Escobar, 2018, p. 98), it is appropriate that the methodology that informs the writing of this report enacts a “liminal norm” (McKenzie in Conquergood, 2002, p. 151) that is echoed in the content of the research interest itself. Looked at through the lens of dwelling, Memento presents tangible avenues and strategies towards non-hierarchised research methods that call for a necessary conjunction of both practical and theoretical knowledge, which foster a “radical interdependence” (Escobar, 2018, p. 21) towards performance-as-thought and thought-as-performance.

When discussing the implications of this process of dwelling for Memento, what is most fascinating is the immanent process of coming to clarity through a process of unknowing. Part of what characterised my journey through Memento was the challenge of navigating my preconceived ideas and desires for the work in relation to the actual possibilities presented by the various elements.

I initially experienced this new space as deeply de-subjectivised. It felt like a movement away from myself and I kept on having impulses to disappear and over-invest in the animation of the objects – to somehow heighten their presence and make them seem more real and more alive than me. Concurrently, I also found myself deeply disinterested in my own ideas for the work, or deeply opposed to them. A strange underlying imperative emerged that I should dismiss my own ideas – as if I wasn’t really present in the work at all. And while I think this was a necessary step in the research journey, it was repressive, and therefore not the most generative space to be in.

The way I began to navigate this de-subjectivisation was not necessarily by actively letting go of my nascent desires, but through letting go of the expectations of those desires. I needed to re-open to my own presence within the work, but in a more relational way. For example, as I spoke about in the self-interview, in the wrapping framework, while I remained interested in the assemblage and disassemblage of the objects with my body, I let go of the expectations of how this would be enacted. In this way, my desire functioned to provide an avenue for exploration, an opportunity, a line of flight, or even a “creative constraint” (Cull, 2012, p. 43). As such, the possibilities for the exploration became available through the wilful not-knowing of the outcome at hand. I noticed how my curiosity grew to encompass the new environments being presented and distinctly remember learning to become interested in the world that was emerging. I felt myself acquiring desires about the environments unfolding – changing, adapting to the ecology of Memento.

Most interestingly then, through an emergent process of curious questioning, I arrived at a series of strong, clear ideas about Memento, which I have attempted to surface in this report. Otherwise referred to as the “emerging logic of Memento,” it includes the recurring “expressive concepts” (Cvejić, 2015, p. 16) that characterise Memento. These include the recurrence of gaps, holes, and fragmentation as a strategy toward distributed agency, and the presence of paradoxical, or conflicting phenomena was a strategy toward non-dualism and multiplicity. Importantly, this clarity that I now come to regard Memento with emerged immanently to the research environment – formed in relation to, and in the context of, all the elements that comprise it. To reference Cull’s discussions around immanence, as it pertains to performance-making: “immanent modes of organisation and creativity allow coordination to emerge bottom-up” (Holland in Cull, 2012, p. 25), where the “organisation [comes from] within the process itself” (Holland in Cull, 2012, p. 25, addition mine). Echoing this, the immanently strong sense of clarity in Memento functions in a completely different way to the strong, yet pre-emptive and domineering ideas at the beginning of the research process.

As a way to conclude, it is important to note that coming to clarity through the growth of my curiosity and desire for the emergent aspects being expressed in Memento reflects a circling back to subjectivity, but in relation to the world I am part of. Here, dwelling in Memento presents avenues to think through how clarity, sense of purpose, place, and self can be arrived at through non-hierarchising, distributive and relational processes. While submergence and the temporary de-subjectivising of oneself might be necessary in the process of finding ways to relate to others in more distributive, decolonial ways, there is an equal necessity for a re-subjectivisation in relation to the environment one finds oneself in (Escobar, 2018, pp. 20 – 21). As Escobar argues, relationality requires “more than just non-dualism; reimagining the human needs to go beyond the deconstruction of humanism…” (ibid). Reimagining the human also requires a creative, reconstructive approach that contemplates the “effective possibilities for the human as a crucial political project for the present” (ibid), such that we retain an “awareness of how we live in a world of our own making…” and “…how those worlds make us…” in return (ibid).

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God is Change.

― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

CONCLUSION

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a dystopian novel set in the near future which depicts the harsh journey of Lauren Oya Olamina across an apocalyptic America. Lauren is a young prophet who has developed a new religion called Earthseed, which is based on the idea that “God is Change” (Butler, 1993). I would like to focus on the first two sentences of the axiom above, which, in my reading, emphasise the simultaneity of relationality and the entangled complicity of interacting beings. In the same way that a person’s being in the world – their actions, how they “touch” (ibid) their environment – has a direct effect on that environment, the same is true for how that environment acts on them. It touches, that is, affects and changes them in return. What results is the sense that a being and an environment grow or emerge together and are thus inextricably and necessarily linked. I lean into the mutually constituted complicity that Butler’s words imply as I tie the various threads of this project together for the concluding discussion.

When considering Memento’s contributions to relationality, the two-part question prefaced in the introduction, “How does Memento contribute to relationality, and how does relationality contribute to Memento?” is a useful framework to use. I have intentionally phrased the question in a back-and-forth way because I feel it promotes a reciprocal relationship between the content of the research (relationality) and its method/format (the practice-led project of Memento). Further, the phrasing of the question creates openings for a more haphazard and nuanced response to the question of Memento’s contributions. This is important because the contributions Memento makes to relationality are messy and often lack linearity.

To briefly trace the overall journey of this report, it is structured through four emergent research strategies particular to Memento: approximating, becoming-thing, excavating and dwelling.  These strategies form the four main sections of the report, in which critical discussions around the research results, and the implications thereof, are presented. A series of recurring concepts emerge that combine to suggest the inherent logic of Memento. These include but are not limited to the presence of apparent paradoxes, or simultaneously divergent phenomena; the recurrence of compositional and conceptual gaps/ holes/ silences that produce fragmentation, porosity, and open frameworks of understanding; and the persistence of not-knowing, both in the immanent process of creation, and in the witnessing of the work. Each of these “expressive concepts” (Cvejić, 2015, p. 16) – “given” (ibid) through Memento and extrapolated through the writing of this report – are highlighted and then used as a basis to think through their relational implications.

In Approximating: Deterritorialisation, touch, assemblage, a critical discussion is offered around the power dynamics present in Memento, especially in relation to a “manipulative subjectivity” (Benso in Lepecki, 2012, p. 77) and its complexities within a research project that focuses on object-affect. The discussion references three aspects of Memento, namely the (costume/set/stage/lighting) design, performance, and sound, and assesses how they each play into and/or undercut Memento’s power dynamics. An emergent concept of dispersion – a practical strategy towards a distribution of the agency of the heterogeneous elements of Memento – emerges as a key research finding. This discussion offers tangible pathways toward addressing hierarchy and dominance via a relational, distributed approach to agency.

 In Becoming-thing: Materiality, movement, the presence of paradoxical phenomena in Memento is robustly discussed, at first from the perspective of the embodied experience of becoming-thing and then from the perspective of witnessing it. These findings prompt a critical discussion around the oftentimes troubled nature of becoming. Drawing on my embodied experience first, a discussion around the limitations and problems of de-subjectivisation is presented, with the help of Ahmed (1999). From this, a reading of becoming, not towards imperceptibility as an end goal, but towards a flickering between the perceptibility and imperceptibility of the identities becoming, is offered. Drawing on witness testimonials of Memento, a discussion around the multiple ways to watch the work is presented, that includes sensorially-oriented witnessing, and loose meaning-making. A resolution to this discussion is reached through the utilisation of a relational ontology, that is: these potentially contradictory ways to watch Memento do not need to be paradoxical, they can rather indicate multiplicity, or pluriversal alterity within a performance work that welcomes divergent and contrasting experiences. This discussion provides potential ways to expand understandings of non-dualism that Escobar argues are fundamental to relationality (Escobar, 2018, pp. 95 – 96).

In Excavating: Memory, fragments, others, a discussion around the expressive concept of gaps, holes and fragmentation is presented, which focuses on the development of the textual layers of Memento’s score. The choice was made to include text, but to work with it in such a way that its power is questioned. In the process, this manifested as a practical exercise in finding ways to disperse, confuse, break-apart and rebuild the meaning of words, sentences and linear thought-patterns using performative and digital techniques. Here the intention was to explore the boundary of the text’s power in Memento’s overall composition, and to find ways to potentially navigate around, or destabilise it.

Finally, in Dwelling: Immanence, the unknown, a discussion around the expressive concept of not-knowing is presented, and an argument for its effectiveness in allowing performative material and concepts to emerge immanently (Cull, 2012) is made. Using examples from the first and last sections of Memento, the discussion traces the embodied stages of the research that began from a highly subjectivised place, where my own presence was central and dominated the work; to a de-subjectivisation, where my subjectivity was actively dismissed and where the objects’ presence was heightened; and finally, to a re-subjectivisation, but through a relational framework. The implications of this process are discussed according to Escobar’s proposition of the “effective possibilities for the [re-thinking of the] human as a crucial political project for the present” (2018, pp. 20 – 21, addition mine) and suggest the effectiveness of wilfully submerging oneself in a process of not-knowing, in order to navigate one’s positionality in, and embedded relationship to, an environment.

In total, Memento explores relationality through an embodied, practice-led performance-making process that investigates the relationship between a collection of objects and a human, and the world that emerges from their interrelation. The broad contribution Memento offers to relationality is its investigation and utilisation of seemingly opposed/binarised elements (animate/in animate; subject/object; theory/practice), which are intentionally juxtaposed as a research strategy towards the creation of an emergent world. Memento is valuable precisely because of its divergent and potentially conflicting starting points, which push and pull at one another enough to require creative problem solving, thus encouraging new knowledge to emerge. Memento’s approach to relationality, its line of flight, takes a microscopic view of the potential affective relationships that can be enacted between objects and subjects and uses this juxtaposition as a lens through which to practically and theoretically investigate the relational ontologies it calls into question.

When considering the potential future of this research, there are other lines of flight that present themselves as potentially rich and generative places of learning. One such line is the relationship between theory and practice in the dissemination of practice-led research. As mentioned in the introduction, I had initially aimed to delve deeply into this relationship through the creation of this report, and while I have offered some interesting propositions here, ultimately the question is outside of the scope of this iteration of the research. A more robust, larger project, focused specifically on this topic, is required. The opportunities this inquiry offers towards the expansion of relationality are exciting both practically, and theoretically, as again, it juxtaposes seemingly opposed elements in a way that encourages the necessary interconnection of their differences and limitations as the very means through which to make something together. While not necessarily an embodied project, it is certainly a strongly practically-oriented one.

Another line of flight that presents itself is the relationship between queer theory and relationality, especially from the perspective of gender. When considering relational concepts of non-dualism/ non-binarism, ambiguity, the unknown and mutual constitution, queer theory potentially has immense nuance and complexity to offer – for example Ahmed’s theorisation around orientation and disorientation (2006) or Audre Lorde’s theorisation around difference (1984/2004). Indeed, there is a compelling link between Escobar’s ontological design towards radical “futuring”, and José Esteban Muñoz’s “utopia” as a horizon queerness always looks to, but potentially never arrives at – a theorisation around “queer futurity” (Muñoz, 2009). Engaging in an embodied, practice-led performance project around these research intersections feels exciting and generative for me personally and as an academic and presents a potentially rich and layered research environment – especially considering Judith Butler’s theorisations around gender as inherently performative (1990).