DEGREES VOL.1,2
(IN PROGRESS) INSTALLATION (PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO)
On a junction of theory and art practice, through the means of photography and moving image, this research, implemented in various artistic media, dives into the framework of contemporary affect theory and approaches the question of affect on personal, collective, and transitive levels. At every stage, the project is challenged to find artistic means of expression of the concept of affect, which is considered to be undetectable directly.
Following non-Cartesian tendencies in contemporary philosophy /merging the movements of matter with a processual incorporeality (Spinozism)/ and researching it in the interconnection with cultural and political studies, I'm experimenting with performative practices and detecting vague, diaphane disruptures of the visual reverberations to come up with a tangible notion of affect. I study affect in its autonomous bodily emanation, avoiding to mix it with emotions, which are defined as to be of the personal and subjective character. Being asocial, affect nevertheless includes social elements, but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning, and combines them according to a different logic. (Massumi 2015). Past events can be conserved in body and brain and repeated; they can be reactivated but not completed. This brings the concept of affect very close to the mechanism of traumatic recollection. Trauma (via Jean Laplanche) is defined as a failed translation of an unremembered experience. Moreover, trauma (via Cathy Caruth) is more than just a simple failure of translation; it is also the result of the perplexing condition of a missing original. (Baer 2002).
The process of acting out can index another significant side of trauma theory: a repetition without knowledge of the source of the catalyst substituted for the memory, where the action itself might not even resemble the missing original (Ricoeur 2004).
The first level of my research is a stage of individual perception, to which I relate personal memory, traumatic recollection and problems of identity construction. I aim to track down some fundamental regularities in biographies of unfamiliar contemporaries, revealed on their bodily level. What affects can unite the representatives of different language, gender, economic, and social groups?
Degrees Vol. 1 (2019) I work in the field of general colonial and gender stereotypes, trying to speak of identity and its variability influenced by changing discourse and the gaze of onlooking. The work is based on personal and intimate material which is displaced into the domain of public judgment and public struggle.
The first level of my research is a stage of individual perception, to which I relate personal memory, traumatic recollection and problems of identity construction. I aim to track down some fundamental regularities in biographies of unfamiliar contemporaries, revealed on their bodily level. What affects can unite the representatives of different language, gender, economic, and social groups?
Degrees Vol. 1 (2019) I work in the field of general colonial and gender stereotypes, trying to speak of identity and its variability influenced by changing discourse and the gaze of onlooking. The work is based on personal and intimate material which is displaced into the domain of public judgment and public struggle.
This movement of the affect from personal to political I continue in my ongoing work Degrees Vol. 2 (2020). First of all, I create a space of a patchwork narrative, describing individual unsettling/ disturbing/ traumatising life events; I push off the concept of place as a memory hub and move it to the field of outspoken. The narrative is built, so that speech can proximate the bodily inhabitancy of the event and cause an affect. I formulate a hypothesis – through the mechanism of affect transmission (Brennan 2014) – the personal memory can be 'delegated' and 'lived out' by another person from a different domain of origin, language, and dwelling. To reveal it, I collaborate with professional performers. Through the method of creating collective assemblages (Braidotti 2011), I am pursuing to obtain a certain form of ethics of copresence. A keyword for my research is resonance, entangled with the notion of affect: corporeal accommodation through an event, the details of which are becoming secondary to the experience of the body. Juxtaposing the straight reciting of my text clashing with a reenactment of a new memory, I want to cause resonance, which in the end can be detected by a third party, a spectator, who will simultaneously perceive gaps and vibrancy of two different narratives. A prerequisite for the project is the idea that the language used for describing past events is merely a construction: its primary goal is to arrange accents in favour of the narrator; to justify oneself presenting to the audience a whole, solid, enclosed form. As a fact, wholeness and enclosure by themselves can cause mistrust. Distancing from the linguistic representation of trauma, I want to detect its flip side – gap, interruption, pleasure, drive, transformation, identity flux. According to Massumi, language is not simply in opposition to affect. A linguistic expression can resonate with and amplify intensity at the price of making
itself functionally redundant. (Massumi 1995; Massumi 2015).
The performative practise aims to overcome the "affective politics of fear" (Ahmed 2014) and brings to the second step of my research, to a political perspective of the subject. I study the traumatic experiences of individuums relating themselves to the collective body of resistance. It can be called a group transmission of affect, where, from the one hand, people are influenced by so-called 'affective politics' inductively "emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the cues, that attune bodies while activating their capacities differentially". (Massumi 2015). And where, on the other hand, groups align their self-identification prerequisite together with nervous and hormonal systems experiencing a process of so-called 'entrainment'. (Brennan 2014).
I focus on the civilians, victims in violence against social movements or protest. In other words, people who physically and morally suffered fighting for their rights or rights of the groups to which they relate. I ask the participant to recall and re-enact the scenes of violence, postures and bodily sensations. I am interested in the simultaneous work of memory, body affect, and performative element. My primary goal is to displace the traumatic experience into another environment and another situation, and to overcome it by working it through: to transform pain into 'dance'. In this case, the use of photography as a medium would mean to shift the focus of perception of the traumatising episode – to prolong it, deconstruct it, and to give a 'voice' to the body expression. The performative practise is not pursuing a documentary aspect; it is not a precise reconstruction of an event; however, subjective interpretation of a first-hand witness.
The performative practise aims to overcome the "affective politics of fear" (Ahmed 2014) and brings to the second step of my research, to a political perspective of the subject. I study the traumatic experiences of individuums relating themselves to the collective body of resistance. It can be called a group transmission of affect, where, from the one hand, people are influenced by so-called 'affective politics' inductively "emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the cues, that attune bodies while activating their capacities differentially". (Massumi 2015). And where, on the other hand, groups align their self-identification prerequisite together with nervous and hormonal systems experiencing a process of so-called 'entrainment'. (Brennan 2014).
I focus on the civilians, victims in violence against social movements or protest. In other words, people who physically and morally suffered fighting for their rights or rights of the groups to which they relate. I ask the participant to recall and re-enact the scenes of violence, postures and bodily sensations. I am interested in the simultaneous work of memory, body affect, and performative element. My primary goal is to displace the traumatic experience into another environment and another situation, and to overcome it by working it through: to transform pain into 'dance'. In this case, the use of photography as a medium would mean to shift the focus of perception of the traumatising episode – to prolong it, deconstruct it, and to give a 'voice' to the body expression. The performative practise is not pursuing a documentary aspect; it is not a precise reconstruction of an event; however, subjective interpretation of a first-hand witness.
