Looking With “Fingeryeyes”: An Exploration of Material Touch in Sonja Jokiniemi’s Performances Blab and Howl
Full text here: https://www.critical-stages.org/29/looking-with-fingeryeyes-an-exploration-of-material-touch-in-sonja-jokiniemis-performances-blab-2017-and-howl-2019/
“In this regard, the interaction between performers and things in Blab partly differs from certain dramaturgical strategies often mentioned in discussions about the role of things in posthuman performance. Unlike many posthuman dramaturgies, Kautto, Gurevitsch and Serra are not necessarily “exposing the disobedience of the objects” (Ruhsam, “The Comeback of Objects” 56) or “tarrying alongside” things “to initiate a becoming thing by giving space (within objects and within subjects) to things” (Lepecki, “Moving as Thing” 81). Instead, they actively and continually engage with the materials in Blab, albeit in a highly haptic manner. In this sense, their bodily interaction with the sculptures does not seem explicitly aimed at subverting human instrumentalization or skill. Rather, it appears to function as an opening toward an alternative, intimate relationship between human performers and things—a relationship built on the sensorial touch and shared materiality of human and nonhuman entities.” ( Lieze Roels )
“In her book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (2017), María Puig de la Bellacasa explores how touch can function as an embodied and relational mode of knowing that highlights the material connectedness of the entity touching and the entity being touched: “to touch is to be touched” (114). As Puig de la Bellacasa notes, being attentive to the “reversibility of touch” (114) not only foregrounds the transformative potential of touch but also challenges the anthropocentric idea that the human can shape the world without being touched in return: “It is not only the experimenter/observer/human agent who sees, touches, knows, intervenes, and manipulates the universe: there is intra-touching” (114).” ( Lieze Roels )