“But When I Put the Tongue On …” : Attuning to Trans*versal Assemblages with a Visual Arts-Praxis

• In Event: Trans-Queering the Repair Train: Performing Research as Remedy

Abstract

Objective/purpose: This multimedia performance explores the affective power of the visual arts to ‘agitate’ (Chen 2019) the ‘unrest’ (Massumi 2017) of what might be mattering for young people across a two-year pARTicipatory sexuality education research engagement project. The project invited 11 young people (age 13-14) to get creative with ‘what matters’ through sculpture, sound and film in an art classroom, supported by two researchers, an artist-in-residence teacher, a composer and a filmmaker. We share a praxis developed over 10 years in a semi-rural Welsh (UK) valleys town, where the aftermath of industrialization echoes down the centuries as hauntings of past life worlds. Over the years, we have become more attuned (Stewart 2010, Stern 2010) to how matters can surface in multisensory arts-informed projects as ways for young people to survive and stay with gender and sexuality troubles that are always more than theirs.

Theoretical framework: The Unboxing RSE project is inspired by the artful queering of transdisciplinary feminist ‘new’ materialist theory-doings in educational research (Coleman et al. 2018) in ways that can attune to how experience always exceeds the disciplinary cages and classifications society uses to render life’s intelligibility (Preciado 2020). We draw on Erin Manning’s (2013) concept of the ‘more-than’ and Guattari’s concept of ‘transversality’ (2015). The ‘more-than’ refers to the ongoing, inventive variation of experience, carrying traces in the folds of the past that propel a becoming Otherwise. We add an asterisk to ‘trans*versal’ (Halberstam and Nyong’o 2018) to gesture towards the rhizomatic connectivity of all things, across multiple territories (biological, socio-cultural, digital, cosmic, elemental etc.). We also use "dartaphact"—a post-qualitative concept combining "data," "art," and "act/ivism" to register the matter-realist agency of arts-based data.
Methods and data: This performance focuses on the transversal aesthetics of making the ‘Thorned heART’ with Alys (pseudonym). This dartaphact began as a clay sculpture with a long curved tongue unfurling from a heart slashed (with scissors) and screwed (with small metal screws) to capture "the silence and torture of how society won’t listen". Under the tongue are the words: "racism, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, rape." We follow how the heART continues to matter through film and a second dartaphact made from barbed wire and skewered fragments of Alys’ instapoetry. We draw trans*versal connections between Alys’ activist mining ancestors, the silencing of queer violence, and Alys’ collection of locally sourced crystals - situated practices generating resourceful posthuman companions to survive multiple troubles.
Results/Significance: We structure the performance across three fugal folds (sculpture, film, and poetry), to open out the queer haze of a collective posthuman voice to glimpse at ‘multiple futures (are) popping in and out of possibility’ (Tsing 2015, viii). Each fold has been created to invite you into an ‘enfolding/unfolding’ haptic aesthetics (Marks 2024, p.7) to foreground how gender and sexuality matters with and for young people across conducive and hostile socio-political contexts and time-jumping territories.

Author

• EJ Renold, Cardiff University