Tracing Sites of Transmission and Contamination through the Relational and Indeterminate Potential of Touch

This paper investigates affective and embodied practices of touch as passage and interval through aesthetic encounters that linger with indeterminate territories of connection and the stirring residues left behind. I consider the contaminative potential of touch as a vital and transformative force for realizing sites of interdependence through a range of historical and contemporary artists; highlighting how affective capacities and relational conditions activate evident and indeterminate modes of contact. Multispecies bodies become sites of cultural, political, historical, educational, and transformative experimentation through sensorial perception, movement, proximity, hormonal signaling, listening, and other forms of performative and ecologically engaged practices. Considering the porous intersections across artists’ varied approaches, this talk inspires us to consider how our everyday encounters create generative forms of contamination through conversation, ceremony, habit, and communion with people, land, spaces, atmospheres, other species, and one’s own past.