SHARED TOUCH

All that you touch you change
All that you change, changes you

Octavia E. Butler ‘Parable of the Sower’

Originating from the simple image of net floating in water, the project soon spiralled into the depths of thinking about, seeing and hearing the multiverse of sympoietic tangling. What does it mean and how does it feel “to live inside complexities of shared flesh” (Donna Haraway)? How to enact non-exploitative forms of togetherness across the human, more-than-human species and other matter? How to imagine the world not as a container, but as a dynamic, porous substance? How to notice the rhythms of shimmering land- and waterscapes and make them audible? 

Seeking to generate visions beyond the surface and the retinal and experiences beyond self-contained existence, the work explores the possibilities of touch. Touch as carefully reciprocal, co-relational, non-possessive gesture, engaging both pleasure and obligation. Touch as expression of vulnerability, endowed with the potential to redistribute the distance in order to acknowledge the “unknowability of the other” (Laura U. Marks). Touch as a gentle voice resurfacing from the depths of the ocean, as a soundwave echoing the geological pasts and the whispers of ancestors. Touch as an invitation to participate in the incessant un-doing and re-doing of the self. As María Puig de la Bellacasa writes in ‘Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds’: “Touch becomes a metaphor of transformative knowledge at the same time as it intensifies awareness of the imports of speculative thinking”. Skin, touch, malleability… Open-ended, exploratory, process, based in the mutual need and desire for ongoingness. 

Alongside with human protagonists, algae and jellyfish are the agents allowing to sense the ambiguity of touch and entanglements. The wonders of symbiosis, jellies having roamed the seas for at least five hundred million years and are among the oldest animal species to populate the planet. As beautiful and as fascinating they are, “jellies are also the monsters, the threats of ecological disruption, because of their entanglements - with us. They become bullies through modern human shipping, overfishing, pollution, and global warming” (Anna Tsing, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, Heather Anne Swanson “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene”). Algae, too, oscillate between being an ecosystem in themselves, an essential source of nutrition and a menace to other life as toxic plague - a pharmakon. And humans, despite realising their toxicity, they are nevertheless trying, and, perhaps, failing, to overcome “bounded individualism” and to make kin. 

Shared Touch is an attempt to imagine multispecies assemblages and their interdependency in a non-linear and non-hierarchical way. It is about blurring division between land and water, paying attention to the formless, amorphous and fluid inhabitants, entities and other critters, while weaving solidarity and response-ability through vibrant entanglements and “having-the-other-in-oneʼs-skin” (Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning). 

The production of Shared Touch was made possible thanks to the support provided by Arts Council England through its Emergency Response Fund. #ACEsupported