research

Affective Assemblages (research abstract)

Feminist, queer and decolonial practices have been providing critiques to white-western patriarchic knowledge systems and their hindering of social justice (da Silva: 2007, 2016, 2019; Hartman: 2012; Jackson: 2020; Wynter: 2013). Through my practice-led research I build on the concept affective assemblages to rethink how form — the production and reproduction of patterns — travels, spreads, diffuses in efferently multiple and afferently unpredictable ways. 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; to propose how immaterial factors enable agential capacities individually and collectively; and to speculate on how ‘meaning’ is imposed, inflicted, and embodied.
In my practice, memory is a time travelling vehicle through which I revisit previous experiences, it is a mediation between consciousness [present] and nonconscious cognition [embodied memory]. Mapping my own embodied memory in tandem with the semiotic processes tied to identity formation, I recognised a similarity in the afference of sensations across moments of protesting, resistance, and confrontations with cisheteronormativities — I have termed the complexity of sensations involved in these moments ‘material intangibilities’.
Operating under a fine art methodological framework, I use moving image, archival photographic compositions, and writing to create speculative non-fictional narratives that explore how the immateriality of affect is manifested through and on the body, whilst concurrently exposing the difficulties of speaking of that which is immaterial without being averted and undercut by the tools still sustaining the ‘master’s house’ (Lorde: 1979, 1984). I speak of the endurance of cisheteronormativities and the injurious consequences they expose. However, in cross-mapping sensations I identify a form of raw relationality, a mode of interaction operating outside white, cisgender, heteronormative, and patriarchic frameworks (da Silva: 2018). Raw relationality is a putting-into-practice what dismissing oppressive ideologies can encompass, and I argue that this undoing of normativities inevitably unfolds queer and decolonised utopias.
In implementing a practice-led approach to knowledge production, my work speaks of experience through what is physically explainable, rather than personally observable, proposing alternatives to pre-established perceptions of embodiment through what I am calling nonconscious semiosis of affect: processing meaning through embodied knowledge and experience. I foreground bridges to affect theories made possible when thinking with practices and discourses that de-center western thought; and I suggest how exploring nonconscious semiotic affective processes through practice-led research reveals paths towards [absent] non-hetero futurities being materialised in the present.