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 Two

Prompt 2 Feb 07, 2022

“The events of this summer (heat, fires, floods, storms) have brought home the reality of climate change like never before and the urgency of making media to address the crisis couldn’t feel greater. But how do we talk about the climate emergency in ways that move us away from despair and disaster coverage?” (Podcasting Climate Change, Vancouver Podcast Festival, 2021)

In Naomi Klein’s recent UBC Climate Emergency Keynote Address, she highlighted work by the artist Jessie Mercer, who sculpted a phoenix out of house keys from the burned homes of the Paradise California fires. In the recent Art in the Anthropocene panel discussion at Oxford University, the organizers posited, “stories, histories, art and music can help with the complex but necessary process of rethinking the world as we know it. Existential fears, moral complexities, loss, mourning, hope, and the struggle for liveable futures are not new experiences for humanity. On the contrary, they’re profoundly familiar and all societies have many ways to explore them. Yet, the climate crisis makes these struggles to understand the present and consider the future so much more complex” (2021).

Across cultures, geographies, and time the act of creating (and of artmaking in more forms than are imaginable) has been a way to see the world differently and to envision new paths, new ideas, to understand our present and future world in new and previously unimagined ways. As articulated in the 2021 call for creative global projects at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia,

Art and design practices offer us opportunities to unpack and better understand the interconnections between these social and environmental ecologies. Art in this sense is not an illustrative instrument nor a replacement for ‘hard science.’ Rather it offers us poetic and affective experiences through which new perception and knowledge can emerge; this includes convergence with political action, new ways of feeling and being in the world and ways of practicing and translating identity and culture. (2021, RMIT, Creature Calls Global Project)

Arts-based methods also afford opportunities for how lifeworlds are constructed not solely by factual or empirical accounts, but also by engaging in creative processes across a variety of epistemologies and ontologies. In addition, arts-based research highlights intersubjective understanding and the heightened role of aesthetics in interpretation and telling the story of data. (LLED UBC, About Us).

Question: Thinking of the concept of “lifeworlds”, how does this inform your work, especially in regard to art practices in dialogue with the Climate Emergency? What value do you see in this form of knowledge creation and/or exploration of urgent issues that operate differently from other forms of research/ practice/ scholarship?

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