Excerpt from Entagled Practices, Hangar Text Collection, 2024.
In Entangled Practices, I collaborated with artists Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Clara Pereda, and Sofia Uquillas—who met in London but now live apart—to reflect on our shared practices. Through sporadic encounters and diverse forms of connection, we sustain a network of support and mutual care, understanding that artistic practice does not develop in isolation, but is intertwined in a web of affections, collaborations, and shared conditions.
​
​
​
​
As if there was in the air relationships that only a change in state can bring closer, Stella’s work bonds me to materiality in ways otherwise ignored. That which for her embodies manual labour, seems to extend in a long-lasting connection that stays with me far after leaving contact. A form of contact that goes beyond touch. If there is a sensitivity threshold, she has expanded that sensitivity threshold.
(:::)
25th January 2024
(:::)
When I was looking at your work Stella this just came to my mind. I saw some images of you, where you are on the floor classifying the glass pieces. That felt like the first stage of getting to recognise the material. But then I realised that in your last exhibition that was the piece in a way, as if those first stages of cataloguing became the piece itself, after organising the materials more thoughtfully. As if this gesture was coming across but in different moments, I found that really beautiful. There was this relationship more personal of you with the materials and suddenly it was presented. The organisation became the presentation somehow. It was a different relationship when you presented it in the gallery..
​
​
​
​
​
So, you saw it differently, when she started working on it and then the presentation... the exhibition and display design as a research method in some way? A manner of understanding the investigation and producing knowledge as the show was being installed…or in the making.
​
​
As if at the beginning cataloguing was a private intimate process for Stella, but suddenly this is shared as the work at the exhibition, creating something different. I guess it is also the people encountering the work that changes it, they having to be in the space with it. You Stella were telling me that they had to be careful with it being on the floor, because it was very fragile and the space around it was very narrow so they had to go through it walking on the edges... I am not sure what it is but there is something about this...
​
​
.
​
I remember when you said Stella that the audience needed to take care around the edges of the work, and I am reminded of the involvement of the non-human and human beings, there is something of that here, the non-human as the glass mass is taking up more room and the human is asked to not to be in the centre, a switch in hierarchies….and that kind of fragility of the centre being made of glass feels quite poetic to me, like the glass focuses on harder, more precarious edges maybe with the human involvement.
​
You were both mentioning about indexing, or cataloguing or the lexicon of how you organise matter, in how the glass is organised, the science, the empirical system, or it could be that way or it could be another way kind of based on knowledge in a way of how things are catalogued—I think that is a nice link into the science that you were talking about this connection between the craft and science 1. There is something very intimate in seeing you being quite tender and close and touching and sourcing the glass and that makes me think of a laboratory and that everyday proximity to the materials in that kind of scientific laboratory sense as well...
​
(:::)
But also language, we are matter as well and it is a network in some way (connection failed, inaudible) we are creating meaning together. It is not that there is one thing or another, everything goes together, in parallel and enmeshed with the history of all matter in the universe even. I think it is not very difficult to put it together (Matter and Humans, does it have to be another binary? Not in quantum physics as Karen Barad explains), I do not see it separate... In Storied Matter, which is a chapter of the Posthuman Glossary, this contradiction that you are talking about is acknowledged: “This means that matter’s stories emerge through humans, but at the same time humans themselves -emerge through “material agencies” that leave their traces in lives as well as in stories“- (Cohen 2014b:1-2).
​​
(:::)
I mean the basis of everything is matter, we as humans go through different processes to be what we are -the embodiment that we have- and we have parallel histories/stories that are interlocked in a network. It is absolutely relational.
I understand what you mean, in an entangled sense -the metal within us and we got all this within us and we need some of these materials within us and we absorb just like today when I was driving in Ireland I heard that Irish water is way above European levels because there is so much metal in it, so I kind of enjoyed that kind of entanglement feeling that you describe Sofía, but I also enjoy listening to Stella switching around the hierarchy of knowledge gathering or the science of discovery in a sense of that empirical knowledge, subverting it in a way by placing the crafts person with their tacit knowledge.
​
(:::)
There is... I hope I am not taking it in a different direction. When I was listening to you and also when reading Stella’s writing, I was thinking how could I understand this from my artistic experience of dancing and embodiment, not only in relationship to other materials but thinking of ourselves as materiality.
(:::)
Become with it, think with it, move with it, it is kind of something that becomes a single thing, not separate
And then when I think about it, we are not talking about materiality as separate, as if saying ‘we are artists and work with materials´. We are also thinking about the relations, it is about the relations. It is about materiality as well, but the relations are what creates a difference
Those are the ethics; how should we relate to the materials? Realising that we should have a consideration and always think of this encounter as a collaboration…
(:::)
And also, a very important thing is that they are discarded pieces, right? They are not “functional" anymore, I think, until she picks them up and descontaxteluazies them and places them in another setting to start another kind of relation - interaction with other beings, which unfolds several meanings…
That is in the approach to it… in the ethics behind it there is a concern. But then a concern is also immaterial, there is something key in immateriality...
(:::)
I’m also reminded of Jane Bennett as you were describing these weekly journeys, through Catalonia, in how Bennett talks of the potential for more empathetic relations to emerge from more sensitive and non-hierarchical ways of relating materially, ‘more attentive encounters between people- materialities and thing-materialities.’ I’m imagining the care you take with the glass-thing-materialities, in all manner of ways; collecting them, gathering them, attending to them, cataloguing, placing them at the centre, and in turn the space (or lack of) that is opened up for the human-viewer, at the edges of glass centres.
​
Which is not exclusive of human beings because materials also have memory, creative capacity, in some way consciousness… and materially generates itself, auto generates itself, the agency we talked about earlier. So that’s very beautiful because there is no hierarchy in the end, the hierarchy cancels itself when you start to look closer to each behaviour.
There was also this part in your writing Stella that says‘the kinships that emerge from the associations, discurren por sus fuerzas y afectividades..10 ’ which made me think about ‘associating’ in relation to science, maybe because I have been lately delving into psychology and there is this dilemma between the sciences about how to approach the study of psychology.
​
There are sciences that have understood relationships in terms of linear causality, but then there are elements such as the existence of the unconscious and our creative capacity that suggest our behaviour cannot always be measured in terms of cause and effect. It has to do with a perception that is less deterministic. There is something about the unconscious which is also related to memory, and all that kind of flow in associating which maybe cannot only be explained within those parameters.
​
In a way there are ideologies or issues that start filtering.. different ways of approaching the same thing. Seems like there is still a world that has to do with the associative which sometimes escapes us... and cannot be understood in the same way as when we only think about how the brain works.
Even in the hard sciences in the laboratories there is always a huge subjective side, you can read the same data in very different ways, like giving them an interpretation or final use that... in the end is a kind of story... like how we edit all of this (complexity?) to create all this cultural construct within where we are living. So, I think in the end there is never anything that is exact, perfect or measurable... in the end all of that is going through a brain and through certain experiences which are in the end filters to read how we experiment/experience the world. Generally, I think everything ends up in an interpretation.
That’s true... like belief systems.
Exactly. Within the response of materiality in general there is an ethics... like in those quantum experiments, when particles are observed they behave differently then there is consciousness or not? There needs to be consciousness as there is an intelligence inherent in all matter.
​
Before we can talk about intelligence, we have to decide what we mean by it. The word “intelligence” is often used to describe human thinking, but if we look more broadly — to nature, ecosystems, or even physical laws — we find patterns, order, and problem-solving that seem “intelligent” in their own way.
That is mind-blowing!
So then how can we explain that? Without a thinking brain... So in the end I believe that every being has an agency but this is also under a context... that’s it, things are altered and modified, go through processes but this is because they are in touch with other entities. And this generates such a huge network9 that you cannot think of yourself as a separate, free-standing piece, because you are also inside that system. Changes of matter are the result of, on one side its own dynamic, physical, chemical reactions, and also its interactions with other organisms (plant organisms, human..), in the end there is an interweaving of everything to such a scale that isolating a person is something partial, (something strange), is of a partiality that doesn’t sustain itself.
​
(expired session)