Reading Interiority : Drying Rooms~Spaces and Intervals in Clay

Interiority / Atmosphere

This foregrounds the drying room as a spatial and atmospheric condition, rather than treating the post primarily as a theoretical text.

The drying room becomes a spatial condition of reading: clay is still changing, neither fully provisional nor materially settled. The reading body encounters this condition through touch, while Barad's writing opens that touch towards responsibility, otherness and a futurity that cannot yet be fully inhabited.

Clay as a troubling interiority of reading and as an material interval that becomes available for a developing spatial inquiry.

Clay allows us to reach out, as it touches us, touchings~bodies reaching out into the insensible otherness that we might otherwise never touch. Their touching is to respond~In~correspondence.

For Karen Barad.

Living compassionately requires recognizing and facing (touch~ing) our responsibility to the infinite of the other (that we are) welcoming the stranger whose very existence is the possibility of touching and being touched.

The stranger who gifts us with both the ability to respond and the longing for justice-to-come (a futurity perhaps of the withdrawn ceramic that was touching compassionately the bodies of stranger~in~clay.

 

Reading Interiority ~ Drying Rooms, Spaces and Intervals in Clay

A drying room is neither simply an interior nor a space of waiting. Clay occupies a changing condition, gathering the traces of its making while moving towards another material state. Its persistence is not yet secured; its possibilities have not disappeared.

Reading enters this interval as another form of touching. Words, materials and bodies encounter one another without becoming the same. Through Barad, touching becomes a question of correspondence and responsibility: how bodies reach towards an otherness they cannot fully know, and how this encounter changes what it means to respond.

The clay body is already situated within a weather~~world, exposed to forces through which its condition continues to alter. Reading does not stand apart from these movements. It becomes another body within them, carrying soundings that may surface through making or withdraw into the material relations of the ceramic.

Perhaps the drying room is a space of such ambiguous inhabitation: where the provisional persists, where the withdrawn remains available, and where the stranger is not simply encountered but helps to make another encounter possible.

Reading~clay~ceramic. Touching~being touched. Persistent bodies, still~in~~play.

What might pass between bodies without becoming their possession?

interiority,

spatial practice,

reading body,

clay~ceramic,

correspondence,

touch,

material thinking,

Karen Barad,

threshold,

speculative learning,