Mariia Kovalevska, Montreal, Ca
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-kovalevska-art/
The work focuses on identity and belonging as an intra-action of the environment (place, space, time), body, and object in a more-than-human world. The whole work is framed by the presence of nature, vernacular (intuitive), and more-than-human which are interwoven into the tissue of the described phenomenon – a walk with public art.
To explore belonging in a more-than-human world, I would like to rethink my identity from something that undergoes the process of inclusion into something that becomes inclusion, becomes-other. This idea is situated in the concept of identity presented in the work of Gilles Deleuze and continued in the “intra-action” of Karen Barad. To become-other, an entity should exceed its “individuation” by breaking out of old, outlived habits and attitudes, “shadows”, to newly “bring into being that which does not yet exist” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 147).
Prehistory
In my walk, the place where it happened, was significant. Centre de la Nature, Laval, QC, Canada. On this photograph, here is the point of departure: I found myself at the intersection of paths which resembled borders, edges, contours, built by humans but feeling something more-than-human.
My inquiry started with an anecdote. Famous sculpture of Fritz Hartlauer (1919-1985) 'Three-Dimensional Cell' was created to adorn the Austrian pavilion during the Montreal World's Fair in 1967. From 1974, Austrian pavilion became Mexican. Hartlauer's sculpture, which had an “Aztec” look, was “integrated” in there as an “Aztec” one. Thus, when the work was offered to the City of Laval in the early 1990s, it was, again, presented as an “Aztec”!
At first gaze, I automatically called this sculpture “Mexican”. The artist was inspired in his work by Jung’s concept of archetypes. Hartlauer’s rooting for Jung’s model of archetypes resonated and then questions of cultural identity and belonging voiced in the air and reverberated in me. The ”Urzelle” is a “human matrix” of “primordial cells” – a unity created from a multitude of cells within different shapes, such as a cross, sphere, octagon, and so on. I associated the idea of “Urzell” as a model of belonging in intra-action as it is explained by Karen Barad: “cells” or “motifs” form the whole, and at that moment when they become overruled by the whole, they fall into pieces to then come together and recreate the whole again, and there is no clear understanding of what causes what, what is a motif and what is a motive, as all parts are set in action and the entity itself is a result of the action.
Motif-motive.
How identity shapes and maps out the geography of the place and vice versa?
Unexpected realizations were generated by the walk and interaction with the geographies of the place. Before going on the walk, I was looking at Google maps to plan my route. At some point, my faculties as an artist, my body, my personality, deeply connected to my native visual culture, intra-acted with the visuals of the place, the patterns of the map in this case, and, mysteriously, revealed familiar vernacular motifs through the lines of roads and paths.
The “motif” that became my “motive” of walking toward the inclusive self, my “self-in-process”, was an ancient Slavic symbol of “bereginya” - a spirit of Slavic hearth religion and mythology which is also a common motif in the traditional Ukrainian visual culture, my native culture.
While growing up, I saw many examples of traditional crafts, especially in embroidery and tapestry, using this motif in their ornaments and adorning “woman” objects, because “bereginya” is a “feminine” symbol. The root “bereg” (ukr.) means both “to keep, to protect” and “a riverbank”, as “bereginya” is initially a benignant water spirit, protectress, and helper of shipmen. Over time, the meaning of “bereginya” developed and became a symbolic representation of women archetype in the Slavic social system, the Mother-Earth, Progenitress: a woman who is connected to Nature and its vital force; protects the hearth as a metaphor of home, nation, and country; provides the continuity of tradition and knowledge; a woman who, initially, is equal to man, is free, but possesses power and can be mischievous and dangerous, just like water.
“Bereginya” became a very symbol of my Deleuzean “becoming-present”. By situating this entity in the context of another land, I do not want to impose it on the land to ”craft” the geography of my present self, but rather I seek to “including” myself via movement within, outside, along, and in-between the motif and the place. I seek to belong in a “becoming-present” sense, where my identity as a subject-in-process is a continuity of past and present.
On the other hand, “bereginya” became my “shadow” that Deleuze warns about. In ‘becoming-other’, one’s “shadowy” qualities may very well become attributed to - or projected onto - others (Semetsky, 2011) which interfere with becoming-other. Instead, for Deleuze (1987, p. 11), it is our present “experimentation on ourselves [that] is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us within the process of becoming” (as cited in Semetsky, 2011). To exceed the static confinement of motif as a self in the self-becoming-other structure, I enter the process of walking as embroidering, - an ancient vernacular craft of my people, - where subject-in-process is a stroke, a mark, a stitch.
Through walking-embroidering, this “shadow”, “primordial human matrix” comprised of the cells of my background, culture, gender attributed to me at birth, and all the stereotypes that come with it are set in motion revealing its openings-ruptures. The motif becomes a motive again. A gap between the stitches-steps is where the nonbeing (in-betweenness) of the motif happens embroidered into the tissue of the place. The areas where the dye outbreaks and excesses the contour of stitches are the encounters of one’s identity with the environment and public art in it through the lens of a/r/tography. They are the moments of in/tension created by the relationships in the motif-motive structure; moments of excess where the research showed its living force overcoming the control of the researcher.
Following “her”. What is identity as a relation between place/space and
body in a more-than-human world?
Embroidering the ancient vernacular “feminine” motif on the urban fabric when walking and moving my contemporary body in and out, along the lines of flight allowed for other moments of becoming-other. Following the motif, I found myself on the contour of the area where another artistic encounter happened - the “Demarche” of Pascal Grandmaison. The artist proposes strategies to readapt the reality by questioning the capacity of humans to live and represent themselves in the modern world. He seeks to understand the encounter of modern life with unconscious mechanisms that this life provokes. Pascal Grandmaison questions the intimate relationships of humans with natural and non-controllable phenomena.
Springgay & Truman (2017, p. 6) stresses the concept of “intra-action” in the context of walking methodologies in a more-than-human world. In Barad’s sense of responsibility, rather than looking for a right response about who walks, about who belongs to the place, I welcomed and enabled the response of the Other of the place. I walked-with my body where the response of a more-than-human world guided my route. As an entity without gender or culture, I walked in sound, smell, geography, colors, reflections. Walking-with air, earth, water, and light, I belonged intra-actively, and my paths were an “agential cut” enacted in-relationships with humans, nonhuman, and inhuman as defined by Barad. Moving in the liminal realm of “sensorial” and “natural” brought me back to the Urzelle that became a pure shadow and light in their primordial state of matter as a “substance in its iterative intra-active becoming” (Kleinman, 2012).
Am I determined as a woman by stereotypes, gender, my body features, or do I have a free choice and ownership over my body? Am I integral or inclusive? - Walking in the gaps of the stitches and freely moving with my body were my enacted “responsibility” to these questions. It was an exciting moment of in-betweenness where I experienced a “nonbeing” as a subject-in-process moving along the “lignes de fuite” as there was no definition of me at that time, but a “pure affect” of me.
Walking contours. Identity in a more-than-human world
Walking contours/embroidering are forms of “transcoding”, another Deleuzian neologisms “employed to underline an element of creativity, of the invention and of crossing – traversing – borders between “self” and “other” (Semetsky, 2011). A/r/tographic contiguity is being embodied in walking-embroidering as a way to encrypt text, signs, and visuals on the canvas of the land.
Becoming-other, I walk-with the place visually revealing its patterns – “graphos”, the “uncomfortable cracks” on the body of roads. They are openings that make me think “with inhuman” to complete this link between human and non-human of my identity (Kleinman, 2012). Created by animate humans, inanimate roads are running through, cutting, and transforming the land without mercy, changing its very nature by enclosing it under their crust. The land, in its turn, shoves the body of the road with its living force, destabilizing its structure and acquiring its own through the affect. And no one can say if those “cracks” are caused by the agency of the road or the earth… Land and road exist in-relationships destructing and constructing each other through “agential cuts”. For me, the land and the road are the metaphor of a more-than-human world where “uncomfortable cracks” are the geographies of self where identity reveals itself in intra-action of human, inhuman, and non-human.
Intra-action of entities that happened in-between the processes of thinking, walking, and making forms the body of this living inquiry and generates research questions rather than answers. Lived encounters reverberate and generate a multitude of interpretations that motivate the walk to continue revealing its pedagogical impulse to intra-act, create, explore, and question the world around. The same reverberations bring to the surface of the inquiry the potential of art pedagogy as an artful “im-public” (toward-the-public) action channeled in walking inclusively, towards diversity, and transnationality of art and education.
References
Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1987) Dialogue (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans). New York, Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations 1972-1990 (M. Joughin, trans). New York, Columbia University Press.
Irwin, R. L. (2013). Becoming A/r/tography. Studies in Art Education. 54(3), 198-215, http://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2013.11518894
Hickey, A., Pauli-Myler, T., & Smith, C. (2018). On the Edges of Encounter: Walking, Liminality, and the Act of Being Between. In: Embodied and walking pedagogies engaging the visual domain: research-creation and practice. Transformative Pedagogies in the Visual Domain, pp. 37-54. Common Ground Publishing, Champaign, IL, United States. http://doi.org/10.18848/978-1-86335-132-4/CGP
Kleinman, A. (2012, Summer). Intra-actions: Interview with Karen Barad. Mousse Magazine, 34 (13), 76-81.
Parr, A. (2015). What is becoming of Deleuze? Accessed on 4.12.20. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-is-becoming-of-deleuze
Semetsky, I. (2011). Becoming-other: Developing the ethics of integration. Policy Futures in Education, Volume 9 (1), 138-144.
Springgay, S., Irwin, R. L., & Kind, S. W. (2005). A/r/tography as living inquiry through art and text. Qualitative inquiry, 11(6), 897-912.
Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). Walking methodologies in more-than-human world: Walking lab. Routledge.