The Growing Argument
Imagine matter is a dense, non-subjective and affirming force, dancing silently on chemical
interactions, crystallizing passions, trickling bodily discharges, crying etymological resonance with
motherhood, cracking micro-violent novelty, crashing into quantum events and crafting eerie
entanglements.
Imagine matter doing whatever it feels like doing.
Imagine that the past and the present are pregnant not only with possibilities which become real, but
with virtualities which become actual. Time leaks shapes into matter and we’re joining a future with
an open end.
Think temporally about material, rather than spatially. As form become formation, objects become
events. Matter is four-dimensional. Growth is the consciousness of the matter-in-flux.
Imagine new structures without submitting them to hierarchical control and without imposing on
them a hylomorphic model. Imagine an argument against both the hylomorphism and the
teleological fixation with form and function that still intoxicate ways of thinking and practicing art.
Imagine matter as possessing its own immanent, intensive resources for the generation of form from
within. Expression instead impression.
Imagine all materials as active materials, charged with morphogenetic capabilities. Our goal is that
of luring a form out of them, of guiding through a series of processes the emergence of a shape, a
shape in which the materials themselves have a say. We’re a mere player in a big theatre of
possibilities.
Imagine that plaster, seeds, rocks, hair, dust, bring to light a life proper to these materials, a vital
state of matter as such, a vitality that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or
covered, rendered unrecognizable by the grand narratives of the past.
Imagine entering a reality simultaneously intensified and flattened, in which no ontological regime
is prioritized and the hierarchy between kingdoms (vegetable, mineral, digital) is disregarded.
Imagine a situation between change and permanence. We’re facing the paradox of things
maintaining their identity while undergoing transformation, the oddity of moving while staying still,
the discordance of coinciding objects.
Imagine the matter is a flow. Then we can only follow it. | Anetta Mona Chișa
Courtesy of the artist and Zahorian & Van Espen
Photocredit Leontína Berková