Performative Diagrammatics
Human practices of knowing and making sense differ across the world, and are also specific to individuals. As intuitions, skills and protocols, how do these practices show up in daily lives, professional contexts, or on global stages? While the arts largely foreground idiosyncratic articulations, shared methodologies determine other institutions. Can artistic practices model ways of negotiating meaning making more fluidly and generously?
My practice as an artist and facilitator is Performative Diagrammatics. It centers knowing specifically – personally, communally, and institutionally. As an aesthetic practice, Performative Diagrammatics creates a 'doubling', the simultaneous experience of one's own and others' epistemic specificity. In this way, it is possible to think about Performative Diagrammatics as a practice towards peace.
The Diagrammatic Instruments used in facilitating workshops range from verbal prompts to fabricated objects, like pre-printed diagrams on whiteboards, 3D printed figures, knotted strings, and live streaming, custom-coded 360° video. They emerge from months and sometimes year-long, studio-based Performative Diagrammatics laboratories, co-creation sessions that revolve around play and feedback processes. Diagrammatic Instruments develop slowly and are modified over time, by observing their effects when in use. Co-creators may become workshop facilitators.
The image above shows a "Micro-practices for a New Gentleness" workshop, at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, in 2020.
Fractal 3-Line Matrix Instrument

The Braid Instrument

Performative Topologies Instrument

Micro-practices for a New Gentleness Instrument

The Intra-view

Contextualizing Diagrammatic Instruments
Diagrammatic Instruments derive from my fascination with the roles grammar and rhetoric play in making sense. Language and reading, interpretation and attention to articulation feed my work. Part of articulation are the conventions it is channeled through. The traditions carried within the languages we speak also include the permissions and prohibitions that are embodied in organizations and institutions, in turn expressed in the many ways of making sense we carry within our bodies.
Diagrammatic Instruments are interrelated. Performative Topologies mobilized what I learned from the performative uses of The Braid. Micro-practices for a New Gentleness draws on structural permutations the Fractal 3-Line Matrix enables. The Intra-view actively does away with strictures, opening latent spaces of knowing. Much of this work emerges through co-creation, in studio sessions and workshops, as part of seminars, residencies, conferences, and laboratory set-ups in exhibitions.