Edited By Rachel Harkness - Knowing From The Inside

AirAirAir can be made to resonate in differentparts of the human body, to follow pathsinside the singer, not only out in the world.What is called the Oxbridge form of choralsinging uses resonators high in the body,mainly the head, but not the nasal cavity.The head resonator is appropriately intellectual, as far up in the body and away fromthe ground as possible. Some musicologists and directors (such as Marcel Pérès,Ensemble Organum and Björn Schmelzerof Graindelavoiz) have reacted against thisand search for other singing traditions thatthey consider to be more grounded (Horvitz2010). Beyond resonating forms within thebody, song moves the whole person.Vent du matinMore recently, the philosopher Luce Irigary(1999) has taken phenomenology to taskfor the forgetting of air; what she callsthe ‘forgotten material mediation’ betweenbody and world. Levinas turns to breathing in his radical ethics, his pneumatism, toallude to “a reciprocal contamination thatopens everyone to the other in the vitalact of respiration itself” (cited in Cavarero2005: 31). Yet, still today scholars of experience need to be reminded that withoutair life itself would not be possible (Ingold2015). At least not life making its way alongand through the ground or in the skies,and some in the oceans of course. We haveknown since the 1600s that some extremophiles thrive without air or any of itscomponents, but except for these surprisingcreatures air is essential not least as breath.And breath has the uncanny ability to betaken into our bodies, travel around andthen be expressed or transpired, creating acirculatory system, an inner ventilation thatis both personal and shared.In a short video about her work withHaitian songs Maud Robart saysç’a bouge, ç’a bouge les choses, ç’a bougeles formes des pensées, ç’a bouge lesemotions, ç’a bouge quell que chose dansle corps même la nuit après le travailil continue. Le corps continue a danserdans le lit, parceque sont des dancesqui reveillent quell que choses comme,s’address quell que chose qu’on en pourrai dire encore instinctuelle, alors ç’acontinue, jà, la personne humaine danssont totalité, est touché, est bougie2When air becomes breath its subtletyinspires, etymologically literally to breathein. Air inspires life, the first breath signalling new life; the last breath the end of life.Vent qui souffle au somme des grand pinsGrotowski worked in great depth withRobart on vibrational song. In Grotowski’swork, vibrational song is an epistemic toolwith which the singer can pay attention tobreath during singing in a way that elicitsa person’s constitutive histories. Accordingto Grotowski we can recognise vibrationalsongs because they have persisted over theAir as breath as air can be silent, but it canalso be voiced. Ethnographies from aroundthe world attest to the power people sensein voice because of its link to breath andan animating principle. Song especiallyis also closely related to healing and therestoration of life. In Marina Roseman’s(1991) ethnography of the Senoi Temiar, arainforest dwelling people in Malaysia, thehealing songs of the mediums are paths.Paths followed by the spirits in their searchof the landscape for the patient’s headsoul.But also the places in the jungle where theupper-body portions of plants met with themedium and gave them the actual songs.Songs are paths and made along rt-la-source-du-chant/ accessed 15thJune 2016 “It moves, it moves things, itmoves forms of thought, it moves emotions,it moves something in the body, so that whenone is asleep at night the work continuesin one’s sleep. The body continues to dancein one’s bed, because they are songs thatwake something up, they call up somethingthat we could call still instinctive. Sothis continues, the human person in theirtotality is touched, moved.” (Author’s owntransliteration and translation, any errorsor misinterpretations are my own).paths that song and breath awaken?centuries (Grotowski 1997). These songsembody particular resonances that move thepeople who sing them and that is the reasonfor their persistence. These songs awakenthose who sing them, or who allow them tobe sung through them. Through these songsthe singer can perceive the atmospheres inwhich they were made (ibid).Joie de vent qui souffleGey Pin Ang is a Singaporean theatremaker who has worked in Europe, Northand South America, and Asia. For almostten years she was a lead actress at theJerzy Grotowski and Thomas RichardsWorkcentre in Pontedera in Italy. After thatshe embarked on her own enquiry about theartist’s intuition and creativity through thediscipline of Taijiquan and what she calls‘the songs of her tradition’.In a keynote at the Association of SocialAnthropologists (ASA) meeting in Bristol in2009, Ingold depicted an imaginary futureASA meeting in 2053, where future archaeologists and anthropologists no longer heldthat the ‘past’ was long gone, something nolonger accessible in the present. Rather thesefuture archaeologists and anthropologistsengaged inIn 2006 she founded a platform forperformers called ‘Sourcing Within’. Shecalled her platform ‘Sourcing Within’ inreference to the search for encounters withone’s own heritage, one’s ancestors, one’smemories. During one of the workshops shegave before we began our collaboration, aparticipant asked her about the body-voiceconnection.a science of life whose overridingconcern is to follow what is going on,within dynamic fields of relationshipswherein the forms of beings and thingsare generated and held in place.(Ingold 2013: 77)Ang’s paraphrased response:Ingold was arguing here against a particular understanding of time. SpecificallyRankean history, in which the past is aforeign country. In this temporality, ‘occurrences’ are ‘deposited’ at successive momentswhile times carries on. Alternatively hesuggests, we could understand time as duration, where change is immanent in things.In this temporality the past is not any olderor more ancient than the present, ‘the past’is itself ‘constitutive of that very movement’.This is a temporality of emergence, in thesense that past relations are all present in thecurrent constitution of things. This temporality of emergence might shed light onGrotowski’s claims about the ancient resonances in songs. But further, in agreementwith emergence approaches such as Ingold’s,experimental theatre has a very simple hope.It is about what is alive, and knowing thatwhat is alive is in constant transformation.The training carried out by these theatremakers is aimed at developing awareness ofthese ongoing processes of transformation,and therefore of constitution. So I ask again,how could we perceive these constitutiveHaving suggested that the voice liveseverywhere in the body, she conveyedits ever-changing flow through theimage of personal associations rootedin one’s lived experience and memory,including what one thinks one hasforgotten. Ang inferred that vocal workentails a confrontation with oneselfbecause the voice is composed of ourimagination, desires and personal experiences. Including what we don’t wantto remember, which can create tensionsin the body in the form of muscularcontractions that can block the flowof the voice. What is developed is anembodied awareness of this very delicateand ever-changing process.Ang compared this process to a journeyleading to a memory, an association,and insisted that although these may belinked to the past, they affect us in thepresent moment. She noted that it takesa lot of work for space to open withinthe body so that the voice can flow, and7

AirThe self in these experimental practicescannot be understood as hermetic. Magnat’s(2015) ethnography of Ang’s work suggestthat these explorations resonate with Fiscus’sGesturing to her body as she spoke about “ecosystemic life hypothesis”. Fiscus’s theoryposits that rather than starting off fromthis space, Ang evoked the image offlowing water passing underneath a rock, an understanding of individual organisms,we should focus on ecosystems in order tothen becoming a little stream, goingunderstand processes of life (Fiscus cited inwith the current, and then against theMagnat 2015: 116). Here it is “the ecosystemcurrent, perhaps due to some tension [that] is the general, self-perpetuatingin the body which might be relatedform of life, and cells and organisms areto something never before expressed,special case subunits of life which cannotgenerating a struggle with oneself, andpersist in isolation” (ibid). Grotowski andthen, in time, leading to a great sense ofhis collaborators, including Ang, Magnatrelease. Ang cautioned, however, thatargues, develop the ecosystemic life hypothblocks in the body change from day toesis as if the body-in-life were an aspect ofday, so that it is never possible to repeatliving ecosystems. Following Magnat, then,the same thing, hence the necessity tothe awareness that these actors strive for is asearch anew every time.means to attend to life as it unfolds.She added that while in her teaching sheAlons dans le grand vent!guides participants in this search, eachperson has to engage in it on their ownMusicologists can trace rhythms, tonal qualby sharpening their senses to be ableity, things like melisma or polyvocality toto see, to hear, the changes happeninglocate specific songs in time and place. Thebeneath the skin.paths air takes through the singer can be(Magnat 2015: 143)placed and traced. Roland Barthes talksabout this as the grain of the voice, thatThe relation between voiced breath andemerges depending on the way a singerthese changes can be heard in the quality ofengages the sonic history of their language.the sound. Even listening to that song is aThis grain of the voice is exactly like thematter of constitutional histories, or as Feldgrain of the wood: a perceivable trace ofputs it in his acoustemology, attending tothe constitutive path air that a person, likethis constitutive path is a “reflexive feedbackeverything else, continuously emerges from,between sounding and listening” to breathis made by. Song, voiced breathy air, is way,(2015). Here is a practice where listening toa path, along which we can encounter ourbreath in song is always an explicit listeningemergent constitutive histories.to relational histories of listening (ibid).it takes a lot of time to discover in thevoice what she described as another littleuniverse.AirBarthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, TextLondon: Fontana Press.Magnat, Virginie. 2014. Grotowski, Womenand Contemporary Performance: Meetingswith Remarkable Women. New York; London:Routledge.Grotowski, Jerzy. 1997. “Tue es le fils dequelqu’un”, in Wolford, L. and Schechner,R. (eds), The Grotowski Sourcebook. London;New York: Routledge.Roseman, Marina. 1991. Healing Soundsfrom the Malaysian Rainforest. Berkely; LosAngeles; London: University of CaliforniaPress.Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For More Than OneVoice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal ExpressionCalifornia: Stanford University PressShapiro, Nicholas. 2015. ‘Attuning to theChemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde,Bodily Reasoning, and the ChemicalSublime’, in Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 30,Issue 3, pp. 368–393ReferencesFeld, Steven. 2015 ‘Acoustemology’, in D.Novak and M. Sakakeeny (Eds.) Keywords inSound. Duke University Press.Tatinge Nascimento, Claudia. 2010. CrossingCultural Borders Through the Actor’s Work:Foreign Bodies of Knowledge, London:Routledge.Hamlyn, D.W. 1961. Sensastion andPerception: A History of the Philosophy ofPerception. New York; London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul.Horvitz, Asa. 2010. Singing TheBody, Singing the Other, and EnsembleOrganum’s Messe de Notre Dome. UnpublishedB.A. Dissertation. Wesleyan University,U.S.A.Horky, Philip. 2016. ‘Breath in philo, thestoics, and the New Testament’ Paperpresented at ‘Breathing in context’ conference 8th and 9th March 2016, University ofDurham.Ingold, Tim. 2015. The Life of Lines. London;New York: Routledge.Ingold, Tim. 2012. ‘No more ancient; nomore human: The future past of archaeology and anthropology’, in David Shankland(Ed.) Archaeology and Anthropology: Past,Present and Future. London; New York: Berg.Every place has a particular make-up ofair, not separated off, but fluidly distinct,as with currents of saltier water in thesea. The different characteristics of a placebecome partners in the way breath vibratesin each different instance of song. Evenwhen working alone, the singer comes towork with the walls, the floors, the differentdensities and shapes of their own body, theair and energies that they direct throughbreath and action specifically as creativepartners (Tatinge Nascimento 2010: 88).Irigary, Luce. 1999. The Forgetting of Air inMartin Heideggar. London: The AthlonePress.Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never BeenModern. Massachusetts: Harvard UniversityPress.89

AsphaltASPHALTOf Still Lifes and CirculationGermain Meulemansstasis. Sumerians and Babylonians used itfor centuries to waterproof baskets, floors,masonry, tunnels, and even the greatgardens of Babylon, while the Greekscollected it on the shores of Lake Asphaltite(the Black Sea) to coat the inside of theirwine casks. For centuries, asphalt served asa waterproofing agent and mighty immortalising substance for important buildings,the flavour of refined wines, or the bodiesof kings.Asphalt is the residual fraction obtained bythe distillation of crude oil. This means thatit is oil’s heaviest fraction, and the one withthe highest boiling point. Asphalt is in itselfa fold of the organic and mineral worlds,as its origin rests in organisms that wereliving in the Cambrian and Tertiary periods.However, its origin in thriving life is easilyforgotten as it serves to counter life too. Beit in the form of tarmac when combinedwith gravel, or in the coating of Egyptianmummies, it has been used across millenniato set things outside of the ongoing forcesof weathering, decay, decomposition anddisaggregation.Today, asphalt is mostly used in combination to gravel and crushed stone to producetarmac, the material most commonly usedfor building roads and many other urbanhard surfaces in western countries. Theproperties of this mix were discovered byserendipity in 1849 by Merian, a Swiss engineer at the asphalt mine of Val de Travers.Merian noticed that small quantities ofasphalt often fell from transport carts onthe road between the mine and the villageand was then compressed under the wheelsof the carts. He observed the strength andelasticity of the surfacing thus formed, andin 1854, the first compressed asphalt roadwas constructed in Paris following Merian’smarketing of the process (Abraham, 1918).Egyptian mummy band stained with asphalt,Creative Commons licence, -mhm/web/object/3011435Close-up on gravel in asphalt coating,G.MeulemansIn the 19th century, the making of smooth,waterproof surfaces had become crucialto the ways western humans think aboutmovement. In the same way that the uprightposition of humans was thought to haveliberated the hands of our species and soallowed for a major evolutionary steptowards ‘civilisation’, the defenders of hardsurfacing believed that it would bring thehuman condition a step further by allowingOriginally coming from the Accadian‘asphaltu’ or ‘sphallo’, meaning ‘to split’,the Homeric Greeks then adopted theword as an adjective meaning ‘firm, stable,sure.’ In its early usage, the term alreadyreflected that the properties of asphalt hadto do with an enduring, stable separation:a split between the solid and the liquid,between elements in flux and elements in10Still life with gravel, dust and asphalt, G.MeulemansThrough its alliance with gravel, asphalt hasalso become crucial to the development ofmodern roads. But again, one has to thinkof this story with the watery world in mind.When emergent modern states started totrace new roads in the 17th century, theyaimed at transforming a convoluted spaceinto one of straight connections. Engineersturned to principles of maritime navigationto decide on the straight route of these newroads. The straight line therefore made itsappearance as a means to navigate surfacedlands with the building of royal roads(Guillerme, 1996). Roads of stone, macadamand asphalt are the actualisation of the linestraced by geometers of this time.us to liberate eyes and mind from concentrating on slippery mud and treacherouscobblestones (Ingold, 2011). Urbanites couldnow concentrate solely on their business andtrade, unencumbered by concerns for wherethey were putting their feet. Enlightenmentand smooth surfaces surely came in a pair.From around 1820, in Western Europe, thepreferred material for roads and sidewalkshad been macadam, a system of layered,egg-sized rocks that compacted under traffic load. But the advent of the motor carchanged the rules of the game, as macadam’s unbounded materials meant sideslipsand clouds of dust on the roads, dirty facades,and even tuberculosis. Various ‘LeaguesAgainst Street Dust’ lobbied for the adoptionof a road surfacing that would produce lessmud, dust and noise. This is how, towardsthe end of the 19th century, tarmac – shortened from ‘tar-bound macadam’ – cameto participate in what might be recognisedas the final and most durable step in theModern chronicle of soil impermeabilisation in cities. Asphalt-bound gravel nowcovers streets and roads all over the world.It has become banal, almost invisible toour eyes. It manifests a kind of cosmicinsouciance in which the complexity andunevenness of the ground is cancelled, asurban soils become a technical closet whereto hide our infrastructure of water pipes andsewage networks.Even in our era of mass travel, asphaltretains a sense of this early emulation ofthe maritime: to many, it speaks of a senseof freedom once strongly associated withthe sea. One can think of the hitchhikersof the Beat Generation, or of motorwaybuilders who sometimes claim that eastern bloc regimes have always favoured thedevelopment of rail over that of roads:tarmac comes to be a symbol of freedomof movement and trade, whereas steel railsrepresents the control operated by socialiststates (Dagognet, 1996). The maritime alsoreappears is some new ‘asphaltic’ sports, suchas when boards designed to surf the wavesare fitted with wheels and transformed intoskate-boards that can surf the tarmac.11

MaterialSurfacing with a smooth dark finish, G.MeulemansAsphaltAnthropogenic parent rock, G.Meulemansa sea of machine noise and warning horns.An intense heat emanates from the stickyground just laid, irradiating through shoesoles. The compaction of the roller allowsworkers to get rid of all the air and water.There lies another ambiguous aspect ofasphalt: it is used to waterproof city soils,but fears water and rain when hot. Oncecold, tarmac is only rock and solid glue, itbecomes a closed up material without anyvoids. Pitched against the utmost vitality ofwater, which takes particles away and inviteslife everywhere it flows, engineers havechosen asphalt and its millenary history ofwaterproofing and stabilising to coat roadgravel. A layer of asphalt coated gravel isone into which no mole or worms will dig aburrow, in which no rainwater will soothe,no fungi or bacterial colony will develop. Asin the coating of ancient mummies, asphaltsuspends the work of life.Few people think of how the roads they rideon are made. Today, tarmac is manufacturedin asphalt mix plants. It is then transportedin heat-proof trucks and set in place at thetemperature of 150 C using machines called‘finishers’ that can spread in the desiredthickness of layers. The tarmac layer is laidon a compacted base course made of severalother layers. It rests on a subbase of coarsesand bound with cement, which spreadsthe load evenly over a subgrade made ofcompacted native material. It then has tobe compacted again before cooling by arepeated passage of rollers. To road workers,working with asphalt is hard and dangerous. Depending on its chemical compositionand the temperature conditions, asphaltdemonstrates a complex range of behavioursthat oscillate between viscosity and elasticity. To be workable, the material must beat a mid-point between grain and liquid.Working with hot tarmac is to be amid ascene replete with the smouldering mouthof a truck’s tipping trailer, and of helmetedworkers sweating around the furnace, in12allows this reworking. From the geological depth where it is mined to road surfaces,asphalt is always tangled between stone andfluid, between the glue that holds togetherand the coating that separates, between stillness and extreme circulation.Of course, the skin of roads and streets alsoages. From being a glossy black when it isjust laid, it soon turns to a dust grey colouras particles stick to its surface. Brokendown by frost, traffic loads, or gas drips, itsinterlaced wrinkles resemble the hide of acrocodile, and soon make space for waterto soak the layers beneath it, and for plantsto grow in its cracks. Under the combinedforces of traffic and weather fluxes, ifneglected, our sandcastle against the rainsoon returns to the cycle of the elementsand becomes parent rock for new soil togrow. Yet, a damaged piece of tarmac can bemelted again, a new section can be pasted ontop of it to effectively patch it, as the manyfixes and black stitches on roads and sidewalks can attest to. In fact, asphalt can berecycled and refined again to the point thatone could easily get it back to crude oil state(Dagognet et al. 1996). From fluid to solid,and vice versa, asphalt is transformable.Despite dreams of permanence and stability, it persists only in its reworking, and itis precisely the material’s versatility thatReferencesHerbert Abraham, 1918, Asphalts and AlliedSubstances, New York: Van Nostrand.François Dagognet et al., 1996, ‘La chimiede la route, dialogue du philosophe et del’entrepreneur’, Cahiers de Médiologie, 2(2),105-115.André Guillerme, 1996, ‘Chemins, routes,autoroutes’, Cahiers de Médiologie, 2(2),117-129.Tim Ingold, 2011, Being Alive, London :Routledge13

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BodyBODYA Choreographic Journey into SalvadorDalí’s Metamorphosis of NarcissusPaola Espositoown butoh-informed creative practice, ithighlights, in drawing and writing, thecorresponding of imaginative and corporealforce fields in dance.Is the body a material? If so, what storiescan it tell? While an assumption of materiality underlies discourses on the body, suchmateriality is seldom accounted for or problematized (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 3-4).Focusing on the dancing body, this contribution draws on Ingold’s (2007) distinctionbetween materiality and materials to reformulate the question of body materiality asnot one of essence but of processes.In 2015 I composed a short dance piecetitled Dalí Narcissus. The piece was inspiredby Salvador Dalí’s painting Metamorphosisof Narcissus (1937). I was struck by Dalí’sadoption of optical illusion as a pictorialnarrative technique. Hinging on visualanalogy, an image within the painting(Narcissus absorbed in his own reflection)morphs into another (a hand holding anegg) and then into another (a narcissus blossoming from the egg) in an oneiric, imagebased storytelling. While the images coexistin the picture, a sense of cyclic temporalityemerges that corresponds with a viewer’sperceptual engagement as guided by opticalillusion.Materials and substances entail a potential for changing state and composition,for becoming something else, for instance,‘through processes of admixture and distillation, of coagulation and dispersal, andof evaporation and precipitation’ (Ingold2007: 7). The human body is also capable ofchange and transformation. Yet, this potential is also its fragility. In normal conditions,we must take special care in maintainingthe integrity of our organic boundaries, leastwe undergo radical transformations, evendissolution (Ingold 2013: 94).Dalí Narcissus emerged from my attemptsat re-crafting the optical illusion in Dalí’spainting through dance. Three main strategies were used: establishing, throughcomposition, an (optical) correspondencebetween images in the painting and bodyshapes as ‘fixed’ in particular positions(through the use of a mirror); using butohtechniques of slowing down movementsand ‘isolating’ body parts; using appropriatelight design on stage.Despite variations of size and shape, thehuman form is distinctive. Spinoza ascribedthis distinctiveness to the ‘relation ofmotions’ which, within and between bodies,supports our recognition that a humanbeing is not a chair (Lord 2010: 61-62)nor any other thing, living or non-living,except for a human being. Thus, relationsof motions allow us to tell the human fromthe non-human and, in an unfamiliar environment, friend from foe. In the Japanbased dance form butoh, meanwhile, thisvery perceptual principle is exploited foraesthetic purposes: butoh dancers alter theirbodies’ relations of motions to craft the illusion of their transfiguring into non-human– animal, vegetal, elemental and otherworldly – beings.Referencesinterpretation of Dalí’s painting: an audience is not supposed t

When air becomes breath its subtlety inspires, etymologically literally to breathe in. Air inspires life, the first breath signal-ling new life; the last breath the end of life. Vent qui souffle au somme des grand pins Air as breath as air can be silent, but it can also be voiced. Ethnographies from around the world attest to the power people sense