LOVE LETTERS

Corresponding, according to anthropologist Tim Ingold, requires a shift in stance from ontology (or how things exist) to ontogeny (or how things are generated). He argues that such a shift has important ethical implications:

“For it suggests that things are far from closed to one another, each wrapped up in its own, ultimately impenetrable world of being. On the contrary, they are fundamentally open and all participate in one indivisible world of becoming. Multiple ontologies signify multiple worlds, multiple ontogenies signify one world. Since, in their growth or movement, the things of this world respond to one another, they are also responsible. And in this one world of ours, responsibility is not for some but not others. It is a burden that all must carry.” (Ingold, Correspondences, 2020, p 8)

Ingold believes that if our world is in crisis, it is because we have forgotten how to correspond and that the shift from interaction to correspondence entails a fundamental reorientation, from the “between-ness of beings and things to the in-between-ness” (Ingold 9). This thinking again, echoes theories of American physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad whose

“notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction”) which presumes the prior existence of independent entities or relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra–actions that the boundaries and properties of the components of phenomena become determinate and that particular concepts (that is, particular material articulations of the world) become meaningful.” (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 2007, p. 139).

More simply, “We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World, 1997, p. ix). By remaining conscious of the fact that these intra-actions I participate in are the natural occurrence of an interconnected world, I am more aware of the transformative power of each small correspondence I partake in — and these are the ones I am aware of.  For I have learned from experience, there are many of which I have no cognisance at all. With each encounter, I become more sensitive to the life that surrounds me and I feel more fully human. Because of this, I can’t help but see the world as extraordinarily alive. I guess I can be confident that the one certain outcome of my practice is that I am continually co-evolving with all of the life I encounter along the way.

This practice is an attempt to align myself with and learn from the vibrational rhythms and information of non-human life. I search for the locus of these vibrations in my immediate environment, and document them through video. I absorb and align with the gentle fluid movements I find in water (currently in rivers and wetland streams that run through my city) as the water interfaces with the earth, the wind (air), the light, and other lifeforms. I also dance, but in the privacy of my studio. Through my body and my materials, I perform these vibratory movements. It is in this manner I come to understand the complexity of rhythms I experience in my surrounding environment. Moving them through my body is a way of processing and learning from them. The practice becomes a series of iterations through which I learn more about myself and the world I am intimately connected to.