alchemical probes

I’m interested in posing questions for the body through affective encounters in landscape, using experiential drawing and embodied movement. In butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata suggests that expressions of the body may be ‘drawn in’ and absorbent, having a surface like charcoal; while Brian Massumi talks about affect as a kind of ‘contraction’. I want to explore how affective interiority may be thought and felt as being co-extensive with landscape trauma, as a scene of encounter for intervening in the Anthropocene. Tasmania has a unique case for the impact of climate change, with recent fires ravaging 11,000 hectares of forest, set off by an increase in lightening strikes and often carried underground by peat. For me, a strange dismay came with noting the shared duration of this event as it unfolded, like a loved one passing away without being at the deathbed. Like an Anthropo(s)cenic event, it performed the affective dimension of what Timothy Morten might call a hyper-object: complex phenomena beyond our comprehension that are nonetheless felt in distributed causation. I’m interested in working with peat and charcoal as sensate materials, creating affective scenes for intervening bodies and landscapes. How can we think about landscape trauma in ways that recognize our culpability as humans, while drawing the metaphors of our deathbed as another anthropomorphism of the event? If affect is a reciprocal field of forces, how does landscape make its mark upon us, as much as the other way around, and what might occur within or outside this relation?