what is the palpable sense of feral fringe?
may we go slower,
go deeper and get lost,
become softer and malleable,
inviting pores, pauses, and porosity,
listening to the unknown,
the ungraspable,
the subtlety,
the palpable sense of feral fringe?
my process often feels like a wandering-wondering mode not led by a concrete intention, but more out of little impulses and curiosities. via inviting pores, pauses, porosity and permeability in human actions, my practice asks: how may human move with and to be moved by the more-than-human world where livable actions such as deep listening, entangled agency, symbiotic relations, and odd kinship are already implicated in their dailiness? how do human become with, participating in the livable relations happening in the more-than-human world which we are a part of?
“feral fringe” is an imagery-sensation that feels resonant with me most recently. i’m still looking for words to describe around it, but here is what i’ve got so far: “the peripheral whose meandering motion tends to be subtle, glitchy, and eerie ~ ”
and i am curious about: what does it mean to become with the feral whose syncopated pace is beyond grasp, whose texture is too messy for codification, and whose meaning escape language articulation? to play with those curiosities, i engage with sensorial somatic scores, inviting embodied efforts of noticing, moving with, and attuning to the feral fringe. here are some little scores:
-“moving as”: notice some motion that feels different from you own; my attention tends to be drawn to something wiggling at the fringe (eg: a string of a tea bag, a leaf dangling on a twig, dandelion hairs, etc), then try attune your own body to move at its pace and as its texture. What does it feel like to move at an alternative pace and/or an alien texture?
- “a drifting/wandering”: going on a walk without a pre-defined destination, whenever coming to a fork road, you can devise a “rule” to decide which direction to go (eg: always pick the direction where the lane is narrower), or just go with your impulse; or if it’s a group walk, you may try collectively deciding where to go without verbal communication.
- “more subtle”: coming to physical contact with something; you may start with a touch with some amount of pressure, then gradually reduce the pressure, noticing to which point you can no longer listen to the touch? Which part of your body is less sensitive? Where is the most subtle sensation you may sense? Can we go deeper in there?
i describe my processes as cycles of “sensing, relating, and tuning”: first, i notice what intrigues me (snail’s tentacles, jellyfish’s pulsation, coral reef’s structure that is always inside-outside at the same time, lichen’s serene presence and symbiotic nature, diatom finding habitat on plastic surface…and still keep noticing a lot more!), and then i ask what is the relationship in it, and what if and what does it mean to embody it? by embodying, i mean, not to represent or illustrate it, but to become with it, tuning to those modes of being and becoming. i wonder: how does such somatic modes of sensing, relating, and tuning allow us to reimagine non-normative pace, space, and relationships, to imagine beyond the human scale, opening up other modes of knowing and becoming?
amid planetary conditions, those practices attempt at releasing human’s desire to direct, and softening the human’s ambition of knowing any single solid solution, and what if we notice in a more subtle yet wondrous scale inclusive of beings and things alongside us, participating in their shimmering, wiggling, and murmuring?
