Dialogic Liminality: Cartographies of the Inbetween

Rachel Horst

A conversation is a mapping of the spaces in between and within subjectivities, geographies, environments, soundscapes, and silences (of voice and thought); in conversing we abide by certain rules of negotiation while breaking others of propriety, manner, logic. In this exposition we aim to explore and enact the liminalities that occur in an artistic dialogue over the course of a series of weeks and reflections. In our capacity as settler scholar feminist artists and researchers, we are interested in understanding and performing scholarship via artistic practice. For this exposition, we negotiated a series of rules for our weekly inquiry. These rules became the map through/by/against which we navigated and re/defined our scholarship, disciplinarity, and research practice. In this work, we create places of overlap and divergence in a fluid “feeling cartography” (Cram 2016), which is “a mode of encounter and trans-ing, entanglement and movement without destination or conclusive points of arrival” (143). This is also a performance of autotheory, which Fournier (2021) describes, as a term “for works that exceed existing genre categories and disciplinary bounds, that flourish in the liminal spaces between categories, that reveal the entanglement of research and creation, and that fuse seemingly disparate modes to fresh effects” (2). Liminality as a theoretical concept emerges out of a diverse body of entangled life work and struggle. We are thinking with those feminist scholars and artists of colour, Anzaldúa and others, without thinking over the specificities of experience. As Barad notes, “Anzaldúa understood the material multiplicity of self, the way it is diffracted across spaces, times, realities, imaginaries” (2014, 175). We take up this material multiplicity in our artistic practice through a lens of posthumunism, which we see as a theoretical pathway into those spaces between agencies and atoms that may simultaneously define and undo us.

Prompt One

Monday, January 31st, 2022

Andrea: Yes! To all of this! And yes, I’ll add you as one of my editors too. Thank you for sending this my way. Prompts today? Mine is going to be quite a simple/ general prompt. Do we want to meet (zoom) later today?

Rachel: Okay cool - yes to the prompt today too. And it doesn’t have to be anything complicated. I was thinking a good prompt would be a one-word “Beginnings” I also put together another prompt just in case yours was complicated:

Buddhist monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh died on the 22nd of this month. I had been unaware of his impact and teachings until seeing the outpouring of gratitude and love for him on social media. I decided to seek out his work. This quote from Art of Living struck me as so beautiful and resonate with a posthumanist ontological perspective:

“Breathing in, I see all my ancestors in me: my mineral ancestors, plant ancestors, mammal ancestors, and human ancestors. My ancestors are always present, alive in every cell of my body, and I play a part in their immortality."

In the context of this quote and these last days and hours of January, your first prompt is to consider how ‘breathing in’ relates to your research.

Andrea: Oh Fantastic. Ok, yes, let’s work on the same prompt. And then next week, I’ll offer the prompt if that works. I didn’t realize that Tích Nhât Hahn had died this month. What a great being he was. His work has been integral to much of my life course since I first encountered him. His books How to love and How to fight are excellent.

Rachel: Oh cool! Do you want to go with that one then?

Andrea: Yes, let’s do that one.

Rachel: Awesome

on BREATHING

PROCESS NOTES

Rachel: For this prompt I wanted to document a sense of breathing and movement and sunlight via the digital and the synthetic. I created this unSelfie tool using Olivia Jack's incredible hydra video synthesizer and integrating it with this wonderful video tutorial by artist Naoto Hieda. The unSelfie lives on my website, but I wanted to take it for a walk out in the world and breath with it, move with it, hold it, and (un)see my face through it, dispersing into it and the environment. I wanted to combine the interiors of a digital art practice at a desk with my experience of the world in walking and breathing the ocean air. I opened the webpage on my iphone, began a screen capture video, and then just walked, breathing, while also seeing my face diffract with sunlight on the small screen in my hand. I played with the dials, creating a kaleidoscopic document of that layered moment. I see this gathering of modalities and materials, including the sounds I later created in composing the video -- the artists involved in the creation of the technologies as well as the platforms and matter (of branches and oceans and iphones), but also the philosophers involved in thinking, and the spirituality of Thich Nhat Hanh -- all this integrated into my body and thoughts in breathing in. This is my meditation on the self as an integration of the cosmos.

PROCESS NOTES

Andrea: “Breathing Out” prompted me to consider—through an autoethnographic lens—the analogies of “breathing to life” and “exhaling into being” and the inherent vulnerability this process elicits when juxtaposed with the personal and public layers of identity. In this context, I chose to explore my own lived experience with invisible disability as a framework for the stop-motion narrative, and the metaphor of “human flight” as a visual cue within the combined prose and images, at once imaginable and yet unattainable beyond the fantastic. The misalignment of drawings (in the middle section of the animation) reveals the innate messiness of the process, the messiness and vulnerability in assuming the role of both researcher and participant, the messiness of identity, the messiness of personal narrative. The section’s mix of unaligned visual elements calls for a “seeing” through multiple perspectives, even when those perspectives do not resolve clarity but rather exist in tandem with each other, highlighting the temporality for both process and analysis to co-exist, to be in flux, to be (also) the space between breaths. Drawing on Haraway’s premise of the material-semiotic knot (1985), this work aims to explore and "breathe to life" the tension of "…to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many” (97–98).

Donna J.Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism inthe 1980s.” Socialist Review, 80, 1985. 65–108.

Donna J.Haraway, & Cary Wolfe, Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

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