‘How does a gathering become a happening, that is, greater than a sum of its parts? One answer is contamination. We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds, and new directions‚ may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.’
Anna Tsing,
The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 27-8.
‘Aren't bodies contact structures, exchange systems, susceptible wrappings, reactive material? Each body that responds to our call, each voice that speaks to us and touches us from within, originates an affective event. The outside moves us and gives us meaning. It cuts out our features. Then it disfigures us. Later it interrogates us and modifies us again. In the same way we displace the borders of the bodies we touch, we transubstantiate faces, we mutate identities, we multiply passions. When that miracle happens we are magic, resonance between two islands, mouth and incipient sea. I like the idea of the visages of the sun against the abyss of the sea as a true metaphor of the swinging identity.’
Begoña Méndez,
Autocienciaficción para el Fin de una Especie, p. 115 (own translation).
Aren't bodies contact structures, exchange systems,
greater than a sum of their parts?
Aren’t we susceptible wrappings gathered into reactive material,
responsive to the other’s call?
The answer contaminates us,
an effective event that touches us from within.
We are contaminated by our encounters;
with each other, with our outsides.
These move us and give us meaning,
and in the meaning
we make way for others,
change and make worlds, mutual,
worlds that cut our features, disfigure us, multiply us.
Everyone carries a history of contamination;
everyone is a resonant miracle; a metaphor, the abyss of swinging identity.
Purity is not an option.
Image: Georgia O’Keeffe
Index image: Agnes Denes