2022/2023

Published in MASKA Journal issue 217-218 (Winter 2023)
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Key words: Parasitism, Institution, Artistic Practice, Collective Practice, Institutional Critique  

This article explores the relationship between institutions and parasitic practices within the realm of artistic production, focusing on the organisation INSISTER SPACE based in Stockholm, Sweden. Grounded in Michel Serres' concept of the parasite, it examines parasitism as a dynamic catalyst for micro-political changes within institutions. Emphasising the potential of convivial, collective, and critical counterstrategies, the text also addresses the impact of neoliberal and populist forces on the art field. Proposing parasitism as a strategic response, the article contributes to discourse on navigating and resisting socio-political dynamics in contemporary art.
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2021

Key words: Darkness, Disorientation, Choreography, Object-as-score, Perception and Knowledge

This Master thesis the delves into the diverse dimensions of darkness, exploring its embodied, sensorial, social, material, and transformative qualities. The chapter 'Lights out' serves as a bridge between theoretical, practical, and artistic approaches, challenging the cultural dominance and perceptive primacy of vision. Weaving insights from theorists such as Coccia, Cixous, and Haraway, darkness emerges as a disruptive tool against established epistemologies and historical ocularcentrism in Western culture. Examining the ecological impact of artificial light, the study portrays darkness as a realm deserving attention, prompting an exploration of the forms of attention required to know (in) the dark.

In 'Situated Disorientation,' darkness is positioned as a performative agent shaping bodily orientation and perception. Grounded in phenomenology and drawing on theorists like Merleau-Ponty and Ahmed, the chapter explores darkness through queer phenomenology, presenting it as a force capable of unsettling ingrained habits of perception. The text extends this discussion by drawing on Luste Boulbina’s insights on disorientation as a labor on the self, casting darkness as a catalyst for necessary unlearning and remapping. The chapter concludes with a call for a speculative attunement to darkness characterised by gestural disorder and disruptive choreographies. 

'Seeing in the dark' ventures into horizontality, sleep, and non-consciousness. Drawing on theorists like Bogard, Cixous, and Didi-Huberman, the chapter explores the relationship between vision and non-vision, emphasising the materiality of darkness and its tangible impact on situational awareness. Discussing the destabilisation of images and the disenchantment of the gaze in the context of Enlightenment and consumer-capitalism, it proposes a 'drifty vision'—an immersive and haptic gaze. The chapter concludes with a parallel drawn from Oliveros's perspective on listening as a symbiotic relationship between sound and attention.

'Inverted and Interwoven Perspectives' focuses on the interplay of darkness, textiles, and spectatorship in the performance "warp." Alternating between darkness and light, the audience experiences glimpses challenging traditional notions of visibility and performance. “warp” becomes a multi-sensory experience, grasped through glimpses of vision as well as the gaps between what is seen, inviting the audience’s imagination to co-fabricate. The chapter ends with a discussion on the ontology of darkness in the theatre, scrutinising the theatre as an apparatus for seeing and making visible through its bias towards light. The inversion of the theatre dispositif centers a theatre about disappearances, suggesting a disruption of performance as a primary visual medium of self-representation and dance as radical presence.

The chapter 'body to body to body' delves into objects as scores in dance, exploring the process of crafting objects as a choreographic articulation of a score and the crafted object as a tool of transmission. Supported by Malabou's notion of plasticity and Stiegler's discussion on technics as tools externalising and transmitting knowledge, the text discusses the score’s technicity, embodying and transmitting experience from body to body. 

'The Internet of Things' expands on the woven objects in ”warp,” exploring the interplay between traditional weaving practices, e-textiles, and the underlying coding structures shaping our contemporary technological landscape. Tracing the genealogy of zeros and ones, the study delves into darkness within cybernetic frameworks, supported by insights from Tiqqun and Lepecki. It arrives at the potentiality of disorientation, resistance, and the right to be forgotten in an era of data totalitarianism.

The final chapter, 'Drifting in an in-between,' explores the interplay between darkness, touch, weaving, and the porous borders of perception. Engaging with thinkers like Cixous, Rougeaux, and Foucault, the text navigates liminal spaces where attention drifts, framing darkness and drifting as tools for disrupting established knowledge production and anthropocentric cognition.

The conclusion, 'something material to hold on to' reflects on the disorienting yet reorienting journey of this writing. Focusing on choreography as a lens to understand disappearance's appearance, it proposes a post-scopic theatre that disrupts traditional apparatuses, opening spaces for alternative perspectives and sense-making structures.

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2020

Key words: Cybernetic Circuits, Hypertextuality, Embodiment, Errors, Memory and Forgetting

This writing weaves itself though footnotes, fabricating a non-linear text through layered systems of links and gaps. Drawing on philosophy and literature, the narrative explores writing, intertextuality, hypertext and the interplay of code and language, as well as memory and catastrophic forgetting through the notion of plasticity. The writing journeys through beginnings, the symbolism of digits, the fusion of textiles and technology, errors as transformative agents, the creativity of hacking, to formally explore sensemaking in a shifting landscape.
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