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