PgLondon

Affective Assemblages - research abstract

This practice-led PhD research investigates the affective and embodied materialisations of
long-term endurance of cisheteronormative structures. At its core, my research is concerned
with exposing the possible ways in which white, cisgender, heteronormative and patriarchal
frameworks are nonconsciously processed. I build on the concept material intangibilities to
rethink how form — the production and reproduction of patterns — travels, spreads, diffuses in
efferently multiple and afferently unpredictable ways.
My research challenges questions of corroborability in relation to realities that are not
capturable through normative forms of legibility. I give an embodied account of the viscerality of
affect involved in the process of endurance, when my own identification began by being
imposed rather than self-asserted; I allow for my injuries to speak their shape, and in doing so, I
highlight the materiality of injuries that are dismissed due to the way they are made invisible,
and therefore less important; by prioritising invisibilised injuries and microaggressions, I expose
embodied and embedded forms of normality allowed to operate as tools for white, cisgender,
heteronormative, and patriarchal supremacy.
I position my research in relation to Feminist, queer and decolonial practices that have been
providing critiques to white-western patriarchal knowledge systems and their hindering of
social justice (da Silva: 2007, 2016, 2019; Hartman: 2012; Jackson: 2020; Wynter: 2013). I draw
on thinking frameworks put forward through investigations on nonconscious cognition (Hayles:
2017, 2019), queer aesthetics (Macharia: 2019; Musser: 2014, 2018), Linguistics (Yao: 2021),
and semiotics (Kohn: 2013) to inquire how form is processed, propelled, and absorbed
consciously and nonconsciously.
Operating under a fine art methodological framework, I exercise a practice-led approach to
what I am calling nonconscious semiosis of affect: the production and reproduction of patterns,
and how the remembering of sensations is tied to affective experiences archived in the body. I
use still and moving image, archival retrieval, photographic assemblages, and writing to create
speculative non-fictional narratives that challenge pre-established perceptions of embodiment.
In doing so, I weave injury and repair, joy and anger, tiredness and endurance through patterns
of resistance that reveal how the [hopeful] absence of white, cisgender, heteronormative, and
patriarchal structures enable non-hetero futurities to be materialised in the present.

Affective Assemblages, Viva exhibition - PhD defense, 2024
(Photo by Lili Huston-Herterich)