Working Title/Encountering's : Barad, Zornberg, Lingis~Troubling Bodies~Murmuring Depths

Troubling Bodies of Inquiry ~ Barad / Zornberg / Lingis

This inquiry considers the encounter as an elemental touching through which bodies become implicated in relations that exceed their own boundaries. Drawing on the shared horizons of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Murmuring Deep, Karen Barad’s queer inhuman~transmaterialities, and Alphonso Lingis’s phenomenology of primary communication, it approaches touching not as the transmission of settled meanings, but as an acknowledgement of an otherness related to our own. Earth, light, air, photographic traces, material surfaces, and bodily remains become situated participants in an indeterminate field of correspondence. Through these troubling bodies, the relations between interiority and exposure, hospitality and alienation, human and inhuman are brought into play.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere names an emergent spatial matrix through which these encounters can be sensed and reconsidered without resolving their differences. Making becomes a way of remaining attentive to what persists, what withdraws, and what cannot be fully known: a tentative transmaterial practice in which bodies touch, alter one another, and open towards further relations.

Alphonso Lingis’s philosophy of the elemental register grounds this encounter in raw, bodily exposure, finding a profound echo in Zornberg's concept of the unconscious murmur. As Lingis demonstrates, light, earth, air, and warmth are not simply environmental conditions surrounding human experience. They are what bodies share, encounter, and communicate through their situated existence. We orient one another within these physical elements before, or beyond, any exchange of clearly defined linguistic meanings.

Barad's Trans/Matter/Realities: Queer Political Imaginings introduces a more troubling implication to this physical matrix. The inhuman is not safely located outside the human, as an external other that can be observed, classified, or accommodated. It is already implicated in what we are and how we become. The insensible, irrational, unfathomable, and incalculable are not merely limits to be overcome in the production of knowledge. They trouble the fantasy that we could ever become fully self-contained, transparent, or in control.

Read together, these three perspectives allow us to reconsider the earlier spatial gatherings as more than provisional arrangements of objects, images, and architectural elements. They become situations of elemental touching in which the boundaries between bodies remain deeply consequential but cannot be secured in advance.

The connection is particularly strong with your 2018 research situation at Open Studios Norfolk: leper graves, meadow grasses and cyanotype contact paper. Here, contact is not only an idea. It is materially enacted. Grasses touch the photosensitive surface; light participates in the exposure; the resulting image bears traces of a meeting between bodies that do not share the same material condition or agency. The image is indexical, but it does not transmit the encounter in its entirety. It carries a trace of an event whose relations exceed what the image can disclose.

This is where Making~Transmaterialities becomes more than a description of work across materials. It names a condition in which touching is simultaneously intimate and alienating: an encounter with what is related to us without being reducible to us.

Spatial Practice.

Interiority/Atmosphere.

Making~Transmaterialities : An infinite touching alterity that lives  in, around, and through us.

Waking us up to the inhuman that therefore we are, to a recognition that it may well be to the inhuman, the insensible, the irrational, the unfathomable, and the incalculable that will help us face the depths of what responsibility entails.

A cacophony of whispered screams, gasps, and cries, an infinite multitude of indeterminate beings, diffracted through different spacetimes.

The nothingness is always already within us, it lives through us, we cannot shut it out, we cannot control it. We cannot block out the irrationality, the perversity, the madness we fear in the hopes of a more orderly world.

But this does not mitigate our responsibility, on the contrary it is what  makes it possible. Indeterminacy is not a lack, a loss, but an affirmation, a celebration of the plenitude of nothingness.    

Karen Barad.

The Encounter : A touching that rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own.

The encounter does not live on or transmit clear meanings. Rather it rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own. 

We do not relate to the light, the earth, the air, and the warmth only with our individual sensibility and sensuality. We communicate to one another the light our eyes know. The ground that sustains our postures, and the air and warmth with which we speak. We face one another as condensations of earth, light, air and water, and orient one another in the elemental in a (its) primary communication.

The Murmuring Deep.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

Barad, The Queer Inhuman~Transmaterialities

Trans/Matter/Realities

Queer Political Imaginings. 2015

Research situation, open studios Norfolk 2018. Lever graves, indexical bodies with meadow grasses on cyanotype contact paper.

Interested in these gatherings of Moretons spatial matrix, as a troubling that is also becoming a tentative transmaterialities a queering of relations and of bodies around the inhuman (Barad). 

What interests me in these two gatherings is that they make the spatial matrix appear less as a set of concepts applied to objects and more as a materially assembled field in which bodies, spaces and relations become uncertain together. 

The troubling is not simply a subject represented by the work. It is something the work performs: a disturbance of the distinctions through which we ordinarily recognise bodies, organise interiors and decide what belongs.

The two images seem to offer different but corresponding conditions for this.

The first gathering: a provisional apparatus of bodies.

Making~Transmaterialities : An infinite touching alterity that lives  in, around, and through us.

This image stages an interior through a collection of supports, rods, timber, metal, a suspended or angled form, and a photographic image of human bodies. These elements do not settle into a single architectural or sculptural identity. They make an arrangement that seems at once constructed, provisional and bodily.

Spatial gathering: supports, image, material elements and an unstable field of relations.

The rods are especially interesting. They cross, lean, meet and distribute weight. Their lines are not simply drawn upon a space; they actively organise the space through their material presence. The photographic image introduces another bodily register, but not a body physically present in the same way as the timber, metal or floor. 

The photographed bodies are present through an image that is itself caught within the arrangement.

This is already a troubling of presence and absence, human and nonhuman, image and material, structure and gesture. 

The photograph does not merely represent a body for the installation. It becomes another body within the apparatus, entering relations with materials that neither share its substance nor submit to the same mode of presence.

The gathering is therefore not unified by a common identity. Its elements become spatially consequential through their differences.

A tentative proposition: the apparatus does not contain a pre-existing spatial relation; it makes relations perceptible by assembling bodies that cannot be reduced to one another.

The second gathering: interiority as a relation in formation.

The Encounter : A touching that rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own.

This second image produces a different spatial condition. A large blue work occupies the wall; chairs, cushions, a small table, papers and a container of material gather in front of it. An open doorway admits daylight and exposes the room to an exterior beyond its immediate boundaries.

Here, the room seems to be both an interior for inhabitation and a provisional apparatus for thinking. The table and chairs suggest gathering, conversation or study, but the space is not fully prescribed by these functions. The large blue surface changes the room's atmosphere, while its dark, irregular lines establish a movement that exceeds the furniture's arrangement. The doorway makes the interior porous to another spatial and atmospheric condition.

What matters is the mutual disturbance of these elements. The blue work is not simply a backdrop; the furniture is not simply functional; the doorway is not merely an exit. Each changes how the others can be encountered.

The room becomes a tentative interiority: gathered sufficiently to sustain an encounter, but not resolved into a final arrangement.

There is also a significant difference between the two images. In the first, lines of support appear to construct a provisional spatial apparatus in the room. In the second, the large blue surface seems to reorganise an already inhabitable interior. One gathers through crossing and bracing; the other through a field of colour, a diagrammatic movement and the coexistence of inside and outside.

These are different spatial operations, but both unsettle the idea that architecture is simply a container within which objects and bodies are placed.

Queering relations: troubling the distribution of bodies.

I think queering becomes useful here if it names more than an aesthetic quality or a reference to identity. It can describe an operation through which established relations are made less certain: the distinction between artwork and apparatus, architecture and furniture, human and nonhuman, interior and exterior, presence and absence.

The images do not necessarily abolish these distinctions. Their interest lies in making them provisional.

In the first gathering, the photographed human body enters an arrangement with timber, metal and architectural supports. In the second, the room becomes an active participant in the encounter between a painted surface, furniture, papers, light and the exterior. Neither gathering requires the human subject to disappear. 

Rather, the human is no longer the sole measure through which the space becomes intelligible.

This is where your interest in Barad's inhuman becomes productive. The inhuman need not be understood as the opposite of the human. It directs attention towards material agencies and relations that do not originate in human intention, even when they become entangled with human activity. Weight, gravity, light, surface, support, resistance and spatial arrangement participate in what becomes possible.

The resulting queering is material and relational. It troubles the assumption that bodies arrive as already constituted entities and subsequently enter into relations. Instead, the gathering allows us to consider how bodies acquire their particular capacities and significance through the relations in which they participate.

Bodies do not merely meet within a space; their meeting helps produce what each body, and the space itself, can become.

Tentative transmaterialities.

I would place tentative transmaterialities at the hinge between these observations and your wider spatial matrix.

By transmateriality, I understand a movement across material differences without assuming that those differences disappear. Timber does not become metal, the photograph does not become a human body, and the painted surface does not become architecture in any literal sense. Yet each can alter the spatial capacities of the others.

The term tentative matters because these relations are not entirely predetermined. The apparatus may suggest a structure without becoming a stable architectural proposition. The room may offer a place for gathering without fixing the gathering's purpose. The materials make relations possible, but do not exhaust their possible outcomes.

This is also a useful point of correspondence with your clay~ceramic practice. Clay is not simply another material added to a pre-existing spatial arrangement. Its plasticity, resistance, drying, apertures and eventual firing change the conditions of the gathering. Once fired, the ceramic body persists, but the relations it makes possible remain open to further encounters.

The two installations can therefore be approached as earlier spatial propositions in which a central concern was already emerging: how might bodies gather without being gathered into a single, settled identity?

The matrix in operation.

The four movements of your matrix become particularly legible here.

Diffraction.

Different material and spatial registers alter one another. The photographic image, supports, painted surface, furniture and doorway do not simply add up; their differences change what becomes perceptible.

Hospitality.

The apparatus and room provide provisional conditions for encounter. They gather bodies and materials without fully determining how these relations will unfold.

Alienation.

The elements do not become entirely familiar or assimilated. The photograph remains an image, the structure retains its material resistance, and the interior remains exposed to what exceeds it.

Atmosphere.

The gathering acquires a sensate character through colour, light, shadow, texture, spacing and the felt organisation of the room. Atmosphere is produced through these relations, not added to them.

The matrix is not a sequence through which an artwork passes. Each movement is active in the others. Hospitality can expose a body to alienation; alienation can make difference perceptible; diffraction can alter the conditions of hospitality; atmosphere can make these relations felt before they are conceptually resolved.

This last point is important for your emphasis on sensate heuristic inquiry. The spatial proposition is not necessarily understood first and then experienced. Its relations may be encountered bodily—through an inclination to approach, a sense of obstruction, a pause, a shift of attention—before they become available as explicit thought.

A reading apparatus for these earlier works.

Troubling Gatherings ~ Tentative Transmaterialities ~ Queering the Spatial.

These spatial gatherings can be approached as provisional apparatuses through which bodies, materials and architectural relations become available for further encounter. Supports, photographic images, painted surfaces, furniture, apertures and light do not occupy a neutral space. 

They participate in its formation, altering the conditions through which bodies become perceptible to one another.

The gatherings trouble the distinction between a space that contains and the bodies it contains. In one arrangement, intersecting supports establish an unstable field of spatial relations in which the photographic body enters correspondence with timber, metal and architectural structure. In another, a large painted surface, furniture, working materials and an open doorway produce an interior whose boundaries remain sensate and provisional. 

Neither gathering resolves into a single architectural identity. Each allows different material registers to remain active within a shared spatial proposition.

A queering of relations emerges through this refusal of settled identities and functions. Artwork, apparatus, architecture and furniture remain distinguishable, but their capacities are altered through proximity. The human body is no longer the sole measure of spatial organisation; material forces, surfaces, supports, light and resistance participate in the production of the encounter. The inhuman is not external to the human, but implicated in the relations through which human and nonhuman bodies become capable of affecting one another.

Tentative transmaterialities name these movements across material differences without requiring their convergence. The gathering is hospitable because it makes encounter possible, yet troubling because encounter does not guarantee familiarity, belonging or agreement. Alienation remains active within hospitality. Diffraction allows these relations to be reconsidered through their differences, while atmosphere emerges as their sensate and spatial intensity.

These earlier works can therefore be encountered as persistent spatial propositions rather than preliminary stages in a settled practice. They gather relations without exhausting them, making available a mode of spatial inquiry in which bodies remain capable of becoming otherwise through their encounters with other bodies.

I would keep this reading close to the images rather than claim that they already articulate the whole of the later matrix. Their value is that they provide material situations through which the matrix can now be developed.

The continuity is not necessarily a consistent visual language. It is an operative concern: gathering without convergence, hospitality without guaranteed belonging, and material correspondence without the erasure of difference. The later ceramic bodies can be understood as another intensification of this concern, acquiring persistence through firing while remaining available to further spatial and sensate encounters.

The Encounter ~ Elemental Otherness ~ Queer Inhuman

The encounter rests on an acknowledgement of elemental otherness: a touching through which bodies become responsive to what is related to their own existence without becoming the same. As Zornberg suggests in The Murmuring Deep, we encounter and communicate through the light, earth, air and warmth that sustain our bodies. These elements are not simply external conditions of experience. They participate in the ways bodies orient one another, making encounter possible beyond the transmission of clear meanings.

This elemental correspondence offers a further reading of the spatial gatherings. Timber, metal, photographic images, painted surfaces, furniture, apertures and bodies do not simply occupy a common space. They participate in a material situation whose relations cannot be exhausted by identifying the elements or interpreting their arrangement. The gathering becomes a touching through which differences acquire spatial and sensate consequence.

Barad's queer inhuman intensifies this proposition. The inhuman is not a separate realm opposed to the human, but an unsettling of the boundaries through which the human is understood as autonomous, rational and self-contained. In Trans/Matter/Realities: Queer Political Imaginings (2015), indeterminacy becomes an affirmation rather than a lack: the incalculable and unfathomable are implicated in the conditions through which responsibility becomes possible. The encounter does not promise mastery over otherness. It demands an attentiveness to relations whose consequences cannot be completely known in advance.

The 2018 research situation at Open Studios Norfolk, involving lever graves, meadow grasses and cyanotype contact paper, offers a material instance of this troubling. Contact between grasses, photosensitive paper and light produces an indexical trace, but the image cannot contain the encounter from which it emerges. Its surface makes a relation perceptible while leaving much of that relation unresolved. The image persists as a body of contact, available to further encounters without becoming a transparent account of what took place.

Making~Transmaterialities therefore names an infinite touching of alterity that lives in, around and through bodies. It is not a claim that all matter becomes indistinguishable, nor that every encounter produces harmony. It is an acknowledgement that bodies are constituted and altered through relations with what they cannot wholly assimilate or know. Hospitality becomes a willingness to remain exposed to this otherness; alienation names the difference that persists within such intimacy; diffraction allows the encounter to generate further differences rather than converge upon a final meaning; and atmosphere becomes the sensate field through which these relations are felt.

The spatial proposition is consequently not a stable arrangement of bodies, nor a representation of their entanglement. It is an apparatus through which elemental, material and affective relations become available for encounter. The apparatus gathers, but cannot contain, the indeterminacy it makes perceptible. Its hospitality remains troubled; its boundaries remain consequential without being absolute.

To make, within this field, is to participate in relations whose outcomes are neither entirely given nor wholly controllable. The responsibility that follows does not arise from achieving complete knowledge of other bodies. It emerges from recognising that one's own existence is already implicated in relations with what remains unfamiliar, insensible or beyond calculation.

Spatial Practice, Karen Barad, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep, Queer Inhuman, Transmaterialities, Elemental Touching, Troubling Bodies, Indexical Bodies, Sensate Inquiry, Diffraction, Hospitality, Alienation, Atmosphere, Interiority, Material Correspondence, Inhuman Correspondence, Negative Capability, Persistent Bodies, Making,