Grounded

grounded

Femke Snelting

Yet another online meeting, in the fall of 2020. A festival will take place on the cusp of water and land, and the artists are preparing site-specific installations. As they present their projects to each other, one of them claims to be based in the particular area and persistently invites the artists calling in from remote locations to ‘come over for a boat trip, and stick their boots in the mud’. There is no doubt that the best way to get to grips with the shifting grounds of the festival location will be to step on site.

Physical presence, and direct contact with the specific muddiness of a terrain can be part of a situated knowledge practice, a powerful antidote to presumed positions of exteriority and views from nowhere. But it is also a proprietary gesture that essentializes territorial nearness. It counts on the privilege of individual experience, and relies on touch at first hand or boot, sticking to knowledge that can only be acquired by presence. Centring on what can be perceived from where one is standing is taking a risk to foreground what is here and now, and to negate interdependencies that operate at a distance. How long did it take for the sediment to be deposited? Where will the polluted soil from the estuary eventually end up? When did the seagrass become invasive, or start capturing carbon?

In their work on touch, feminist thinker Karen Barad propose that ‘being in touch’ is what allows experiments to become participative, rather than remaining at some remove. They invite us to explore queer ways of being in touch, which involve (other-than-human) others besides ourselves:

Thinking has never been a disembodied or uniquely human activity. Stepping into the void, opening to possibilities, straying, going out of bounds, off the beaten path—diverging and touching down again, swerving and returning, not as consecutive moves but as experiments
in in/determinacy.

The kind of touch Barad propose is not counting on the legibility of what it steps into, nor on the reassuring effects of affection. As they remind us elsewhere, for a physicist, touch is but a sensation caused by electromagnetic repulsion.

How to be grounded, without getting stuck in the mud of personal experience? I guess I am trying to re-articulate ‘grounded’ as a ‘thinking-and-making-with’ that is always already part of what it steps into.
A grounded practice that does not depend on knowing where the ground begins or ends, and can let go of pre-established notions of fore-ground and back-ground.

Ground and feet, land and movement, verticality and time, situatedness and axes: the more of them we take into account when giving account of the spheres
we share, the more degrees of freedom we are going to endow

our deterritorialized and reterritorialized lives with.

To be grounded means to be porous to remote impressions, to trust the touching done by (other-than-human) others, and to take into account that which it is caught up with, especially when it is not understood, can not be felt or ever be intuited.
Because however distant, our deterritorialized
and reterritorialized experiences are simply always
in touch.