Mariana Aboim

Through my practice based research I develop the concept affective assemblages to rethink the ways immaterial factors enable agential capacities individually and collectively. I suggest that hopeful futurities are momentarily materialised in the unfolding of street protests and activism. I do this by using speculative fiction within a fine art methodological framework, focusing on writing methods that allow an articulation of the immateriality of ‘affect’ within affective assemblages, and attending to ‘what our bodies sense, but cannot make sense of [yet]’.

I situate the premises under which it is possible to research how agency can be nonconsciously whet through the sensorial by using analytical frameworks put forward within raw materialism (da Silva: 2014, 2015, 2018), nonconscious cognition (Hayles: 2017, 2019), and queer aesthetics (Campt: 2017; Musser: 2014, 2018). I further draw on science and speculative fiction work addressing non linear and a-temporalities, inherited memories and embodiments of knowledge (Delany: 1973 (1966); Gumbs: 2018, 2020; Russ: 1980, 1985); realities in which non-human and human experiences are considered through their intra-activity (Okorafor: 2014; Tiptree Jr.: 1985); and material/immaterial simultaneity of sensational and emotional interplays (Budge: 2019; Hedva: 2018); all of which being part and parcel of how futures unfold.

I foreground an alternative to pre-established perceptions of embodiment using an arts based inquiry into nonconscious semiosis of affect. My research focuses on forms of care and solidarity that are nonconsciously propelled, unpredictable, and immeasurable. As such, I draw on literary and theoretical bases that acknowledge Western heteropatriarchic onto-epistemes, while undoing them by addressing the voids resulting from universalised ‘tools for scientific reasoning’ (Hartman: 2008; Jackson: 2020; Silva: 2018; Sharpe: 2016; Yusoff: 2018).

Drawing theory from fiction as medium of artistic research points to the ‘field elasticity’ that has long been attracting scholars from the humanities, social sciences, critical theories, among others, to the realm of the arts. However, with my practice I draw theory through fine arts as opposed to doing theory about fine art. Finally, I propose affective assemblages as a thinking framework through which to explore potential ways of knowing alternatively, and their effects on sociopolitical modes of existing otherwise.