Float
I spent my first week discussing and gathering potential floating spots to explore. I am ‘trying’ to develop floating as a methodology. The concept of floating is basically going into bodies of water and floating. You try to keep your body flat, allowing your head to rest on the water’s surface, slowly (if you need to) move your hands and feet to maintain buoyancy. I have floated in rivers, lakes, streams, and a few oceans. Karen Barad explores touching in the essay “On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.”
“The idea is to do collaborative research, to be in touch, in ways that enable response-ability”
Floating is touching water, it is a collaboration, by floating I hope to better understand the bodies relationship to water. There is an extremely supportive nature to floating, a real sensation of the body being held. Barad continues to discuss the non-human,
“…being in touch with the other, of feeling the exchange of e-motion in the binding obligations of entanglements”
Being in touch with the non-human is something that has slowly found its way into my float routine. Someone asked me recently who I think my audience is and I stumbled abit and didn’t formalise an answer. But of course thinking about it later, I realised Olive has seen and experienced more floats than any human being. When previously exploring Co Lough’s coastline I came across seals on numerous occasions. So again, thinking about the non-human and how this can potentially interact with the floating development is interesting. Back to the poster and the title of my residency/exhibition Idle Sweats the title references Astrida Neimanis publication ‘Bodies of Water Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology’ Neimanis discussions how “a watery body sloshes and leaks and excretes and perspires”. This line made me contemplate what water I carried with me to the residency. Within the first chapter of the publication Neimanis situates embodying water;
“Did your eyes water upon finding that old letter folded in the pages of a book, long forgotten? The saliva that floods your mouth when your teeth pop the peel of a juicy kumquat; the sweat slowly dampening the fabric in your armpit, or at the small of your back as you sit on this bus, on this day, in this too-hot town…All of these waters are about a specifically situated you”
This paragraph links Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledge” and how it challenges the idea of objective, universal knowledge and emphasises the importance of diverse perspectives and experiences of understanding the world. Next up will be to visit the floating spots and start mapping the initial research.
Mentioned reads ~