“I am a little scared: scared of surrendering completely because the next instant is the unknown. The next instant, do I make it? Or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath.”
—Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, (1973/2012, 3)
“Nothingness is not absence, but the infinite plenitude of openness. [...] The possibilities for justice-to-come reside in every morsel of finitude.”
—Karen Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice (2012, 16–17)
You are invited to become part.
You are invited to partial responsibility.
You are invited to an un-hierarchized commitment.
You are invited to recognize collective aspects of knowledge production as political forces.
You are invited to be an active radius of touch.
You are invited to escape binary logics.
You are invited to cut things together-apart.
You are invited to take responsibility for the force of becoming.
You are invited to rethink causality as intra-activity.
You are invited to re-conceptualize boundaries and properties.
You are invited to think of affect as matter.
You are invited to demand active co-presence.
You are invited to share suffering collectively.
You are invited to recognize how societal power relations materialize in and through bodies.
You are invited to raise awareness of daily violence.
You are invited to demand social justice.
You are invited to mobilize trust as much as insecurity, support as much as dependence.
You are invited to acknowledge simultaneous singularity and multiplicity.
You are invited to activate something that has already happened, and which by these actions continues to happen.
You are invited to keep the future open to that which has yet to emerge.
You are invited to a masturbatory cooperation and erotic togetherness.
You are invited to act transversally.
You are invited to trust impermanence.
You are invited to an unending dynamism.
I have been invited.
You are invited.
Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) is a live dissertation in choreography. It is a dissertation that proposes and explores a specific format, a dissertation that will be written through space-time-language-matter with and for human and more-than-human bodies, and other discursive-material becomings. It spans 72 hours, situating itself within and proceeding from a decommissioned nuclear reactor hall 25 meters below ground.
Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) emphasizes the ever-present negotiations of vulnerability, intimacy, force, and power with / in choreography and performance. It engages a posthumanist and “agential-realist” (Barad, 2007) reworking of the notion of performativity, in which all bodies (not only human bodies) come to matter through the world’s performativity—its iterative intra-activity. In this framework, knowledge is made as a direct material engagement, a cutting “together-apart” (Barad, 2007)—a process by which cuts enact violence but also open up and rework agential conditions of possibility.
Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) recognizes the force of ethico-onto-epistemological entanglements (of matter, history, politics, social relations, theory, and practice) through intra-action. It asks what happens to the notion of research objectivity when the researcher (“I”) and the researched (“object”) occupy the same location (“my body”)? What happens when this understanding of location shifts, to become a location without a locus?
If we are being-of-the-world, how can we ever avoid participation? In an ongoing continuum of entanglement, the moment of connection is unavoidable. It demands that we are attentive to our mutual co-constitutiveness, and that we take responsibility for what gets excluded as well as what comes to matter. During Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action), diffractive choreographic methods and techniques will be applied and experienced in a process of queering causality, agency, and relationality, and dislocating authority, while (my / the / our) human and more-than-human body / bodies pursue(s) embodied affinities, and a state of becoming-with.
Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) positions itself against the proliferation of capitalist logistics in academic and artistic contexts (the neoliberal transformation of universities, the implementation of an administrative superstructure, proliferation of technologies of efficiency, fragmentation and competition, commercialization of artistic activity, etc.). It asks how this socio-economic trajectory intra-actively infiltrates the live practices of making knowledge, and how such cuts (or transformations) might be made differently?
You are invited to join Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) in a process of articulating / manifesting forces of knowledge entanglement through live acts of documentation.