Contingent Agencies Notations

CONTINGENT AGENCIES NOTATIONS

At the edge of the retina, I go scenting signs—lucid harbingers of what is yet to come: quasi things, quasi objects, quasars? Impulses stir from the field. To borrow precarious signs from the periphery of things, words from the margins, language poised at the oral cavity, where the horizon unfurls, threading itself into the body—spacetime bodies—where polyrhythms are more felt than heard. Here, a writing-drawing emanates, overwrites, and configures. It is in this open field that a practice of diagramming life lines situates itself, tracing the jolty ruptures of me, the fluid transitions of you, the hairline cracks of us, fog-holes of them, and deep shallows of it—where unknown forces emerge, quietly infiltrating the scene, only to vanish as suddenly as they have appeared. Ghostly, elsewhen, at ween, spirited away.

In phases, during the Contingent Agencies Research Project, drawing became a daily practice, which I further developed “point by point, line by line.” Over the course of the project, to date more than
300 drawings have been produced in various forms, formats, and techniques on paper, canvas, and in sand. From quick notations in notebooks while walking, during train journeys, in the midst of demonstrations, in crowded Brussels cafés, or the deserted coasts at Cape Woolamai in Australia, to drawings in parks, in the woods, the French and Austrian Alps, on the highway, or at the sea—during
the day, at night, and at dusk and dawn, in the pouring rain, snow, or scorching desert heat.

A small selection of these can be found here in the comprehensive publication Contingent Agencies – Inquiring Into the Emergence of Atmospheres, Hatje Cantz 2025, a larger selection is online on the projects‘ website. In the beginning I started with small drawings and expanded these to sheets of paper that cover the entire length of my body, or also wrote, scratched directly on site, into the dusty earth. Ephemeral in situ diagrams. Over the course of my explorations, also round drawings soon arose, entirely following my own field of perception, along a perception sphere felt to be round or oval through to those edges where inner and outer spheres collide, coalesce, froth up, form bubbles, become wor(l)dings.