Re-sounding Movements
In the event of Re-sounding Movements, drawing resonates across the vital spaces of the in-between, attempting to capture the felt vitality of passages forming relationally within and across bodies. The in-between, to be differentiated from the between that divides and separates, is ‘a movement of generation and dissolution in a world of becoming where things are not yet given […] an interstitial differentiation, a fission/fusion reaction, a winding and unwinding, inhalation and exhalation’. (Ingold 2015) Not mediation joining distinct entities from the outside, but rather immediation: a coming-together into relation for the sake of collective change and becoming; an event of co-composition. (Massumi 2018) The interval probed here is a line of flight that emerges as atmospheric where ‘atmosphere is about the sensory experience […] a space of affect’: an ‘indeterminate spatially extended quality of feeling’. (Ingold 2015)
The series of collaborative drawings and videos (involving the percussionist Michel Bonneau and myself) attempts to seize the flow and resonance of sound, tracing the ephemerality of the musician’s gestures as he improvises in the interval of rhythms and their corporeal-material manifestation. Charcoal (and pigment) powder was sprinkled onto resilient surfaces of paper that were loosely stretched over various percussion instruments. (Different colored natural pigments were explored for their distinctive qualities of weight and volatility.) The musician then improvised with these instruments, leaving traces of rhythmic forces as they responded to the thin resounding membranes and coalesced in the space in-between volatile charcoal powder and sonorous reverberation. The fingers, as Ingold points out about the cello player, ‘show up simultaneously in two quite different ways, at once corporeal, in the haptic space of performance, and as phantom, in the atmospheric space of explosion’. Here, ‘sound wraps around [fingers, palms or mallets] forming eddies in the process. Every eddy is a center of auditory awareness.’ (ibid.) Re-sounding Movements exposes the haptic in the optical and auditory as corporeal forces carry the charcoal in the air, flowing, fluctuating, and fusing over the interacting membranes of paper and goat’s hide. A smooth space emerges, ‘occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) It is a ‘nomadic absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute passage, which in nomad art merges with its manifestation’. (ibid.) Smooth space is continually being traversed and transformed by the striated space of markings (or finger-prints) on the paper that punctuate and fix the charcoal to the surface while simultaneously propelling it above. Striated space is at once immobilized and dissolved, enabling smooth space to develop in the process; nomad space and sedentary space co-exist in their formation.
Re-sounding Movements sounds the body’s ability to feel the space of the in-between, to interact with, and to be reassembled in other bodies. Perhaps one could borrow Madeline Gins and Arakawa’s expression: ‘”organism that persons” because it portrays persons as being intermittent and transitory outcomes of coordinated forming rather than honest-togoodness entities’. (Madeline Gins and Arakawa 2002) In this co-forming new relations emerge that extend the spectrum of potentiality and mobilize intensities and vitality affects. The co-adventure of Re-sounding Movements has in us, Michel and myself, reinforced at a micro-level our sense of time and space and what it is to ride the plane of immanence: the binding force that enables thought and body to connect, relate, converge and diverge, create alliances and tensions whose intensities are ever-changing. What is left, on our walls, of the in-between is the trace of ephemerality that can only resound in the body as sensation, re-composing the sensuous intensities that inhabit the paper.
