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*gabriel :
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*when i think of objects , i think of all the little things i've held in my hand ... big things don't come to mind ... i don't tend to think of the chairs that have sustained me , the floors and the beams that have cradled me ... of my mattress ... of my toilet ... when i think of objects , i think of my childhood obsession with figurines and tchotchkes ... i had a vitrine in my childhood room that vesselled my collection of little things that i would take out and stroke and caress and play with ... they weren't toys , but they weren't not-toys either ... a kind of in-between fetish-thing ... kind of like ... food ? ... i loved their different weights , textures , smells ... i had polished gems , a little bible with a cover made of wood , i had a red chinese vase , i had a little swarovski owl and black sheep , i had chinese clay warriors , wooden animals , an ostrich egg , a wooden cardinal sculpted by my grandfather , a blue-green clay pot i made with a spinning wheel , a hacky-sack , two cadillac hotwheels , a piece of smokey quartz i found in a lake , a picture of my parents in a rusty brass display frame ... i know these objects by heart and for some reason i felt the need to preserve them ... they were important ... naturally one could have taken this as an onset "hoarding issue" ! but it wasn't like that ... the bond between us wasn't purely nosalgic or sentimental ... it was a material , weight , textural , chromatic , relational dialogue ... i liked these objects for who they were , not necessarily what they did for me ; their functionality ... again , they weren't toys ... i had a bin for my toys ... they were pieces that deserved care , speculation , attention , patience ... it was like i was watching them grow in this vitrine ... their breath causing dust-filled stains on the different shelves and walls of the glass ... 
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*what objects do you love ? has en object ever surprised or excited you ? what do you think of when i say "object" ? what is the best time you`ve had with an object ?
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*jara rocha : 
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*Very often, objecthood operates as an imposed condition for a particular material arrangement, doesn't it? I read and re-read your lovely list of beloved material compositions, not-toys, and my eyes roll back and forth the sneaky property gestures that language imposes over them. Language puts them after "I had" indicators of ownership. Language also makes them round by specific namings of utilities (vase), sizes (little), colors (red) and so forth. In relation (or in reaction) to that, it is always super inspiring to remind ouselves that language itself is a complex apparatus of disposable objects, arranged through a complex sociotechnical process of apprehension, normalisation and also phonetic naturalisation to name just a few of the intricate processualities that the set of objects we call "language" go through over and over, on a daily basis.
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*Language objects also consitute us and hence are a powerful agency of and for worlding. Wording is wordling. A tone, a glyph, a grammar protocol, a syntax norm. An accent, a slang. All technosocial arrangements and hence mundane objects that end up producing, very deeply, what emerges as an "I", as a "we".
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*My language toys (not mine as in property, but as in siblings, companions or comrades) are the invented figurations we unfold with friends and colleagues to say things loud, to name things otherwise and to articulate processes with verbs that were never given to us... or of which we feel we've been historically dispossessed. Think of circlusion as the opposite to penetration. Think of alloyance as the mixture between alloy and alliance. Think of implicancies as a way to speak of entanglement without departing from ontological separation.
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*I really enjoyed playing with you around some linguistic not-toys you brought by through your theoretical sci-fi praxis. Would you like to say a little more about how you ended up choosing for poetry (or poethics?), compiling an unorthodox glossary and even repurposing quite thick greek terms by your own, queer, means? To me it almost feels like your written made-up objecthood has become a rich elastic neighborhood where some of us could come and speand a couple of seasons for sure...
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*g : 
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*It's so true , how the perverse use of possessive verbs and the phraseology of ownership conditions how we see objects and what we feel about them ... nostalgia is often projected towards objects ; containers of some esoteric or spiritual translation of something in our past we want to remember and hold on to even though it's long gone ; like sentimental ashes ... why do we consider objects urns ? does my ex-boyfriend live on through the shirt he gave me years ago ? how much of him is contained and carried by said object ? I couldn't let go of the shirt because it had pieces of him in it , it was like i was possessing him through possessing the shirt ... these are reasons why i have learned to be rather anti-nostalgic !
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*Yes ! The codification and taxonomy of objects , isn't it our way of grasping them ? dominating them ? processing them ? I like your use of the word 'processuality' ; to process something is to reduce it to what it isn't to better assimilate and digest it , we fear things taking too long to digest , don't we ?... so why force-decompose when we can alloy (alloycate ?) !?  this is a great poetical subversion that is so polyamorous and fertile ... this leads me to your question :
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*poetics (poethics) thrive off of combinations of things ... i used this rhetoric often in my writing : fusion , merge , mesh , amalgamate , transmute , transform , mutate , reconfigure , meld , morph , reform , etc. because they are words i love phonetically and conceptually ... they have this defiant ring to them , like they are gently stubborn processes that just watch us humans try to seperate and build walls and borders while they laugh and say "ha ! you really think you can isolate yourself from the great process ?! from the becoming ? from the natural tendency towards integration and combination ?!" to subvert , or transvert , language we have to do it DIT (do it together) , poetically ... just look at e e cummings and emily dickinson , how they bend and fold so gracefully language and syntax and form ... it's totally cyborg ! to create word-mutants is to challange this norm , and anyone can do it ... it takes no authority to transgress queerly ... i guess doing Affective Vessels was kind of a way to prove to myself that i too , a little 25 year old queer kid , could weave a theory-poetry tapestry using my own experiences and observations ... stuff that had just been brewing and fermenting for years ... regarding greek and latin , i included etymology frequently because i think we've forgetten what certain things can mean ... not that Latin or Greek are 'purer' or more 'thruthful' languages , not at all ... but they actually help us meditate with words , go back to them and resignify them ... if 'affect' means 'to do towards' , can the affective turn not just be about humans and our psychobabble , and entropic tendencies to rigidly define words and stick with those meanings ? it's kind of like saying : maybe we can revisit words and realize how much we've imprisioned them when they are completely free agents ...
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*what i love about your project 'possible bodies' , is the sub-statement it emits : you too can be a body ... how do you confront the future and the future tense ? can you think of a time when you combined or transverted something and you were surprised it worked ? that you were capable of doing so ? (also your name almost means 'jar' in english , how serendipitous !)

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*j : 

*Hmmm well… I think that in the Possible bodies project we (Femke, myself and many other beloved companions) engaged for some years with the assumption that unfortunately we are bodies; meaning: we are socially read as such. It’s not so much that we have bodies or that we can end up being bodies, in the future tense… but that there is a genealogy of somatic fictioning that very sharply ended up composing what is understood as body. But that of course doesn’t happen in the ether, neutrally or innocently: corpo-realities emerge under very concrete regimes of power that define what counts and what does not count as body. As you said: naming delimits the world and its wordlings. And i say: quite violently, often. That’s why we persistently use the ‘so-called bodies’ formula, to not let go of complexity and of the potential to problematize from scarch the fact that bodies are made-up political fictions that are more or less alive (or that are alive under the cataloguing of life that is, in itself, yet another cultural fiction that separates the living from the nonliving with very particular aims of production and reproduction in the roughest terms of the patriarcho-colonial capitalist extractivist Modern project). If we allow for the naturalization of such fiction, we risk allowing for the ongoing establishment of rigidification of invented (to-to-bottom) modes of existence such as gender, race, age, species, ability… and so forth. Affective Vessels is an excellent contribution to such resistance, isn’t it?


*g : 
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*i see ... hmm... isn't this semiotic's fault ? I often wonder , in a chicken-or-the-egg style , what came first : semiotics or the phenomenon behind semiotics ... in other words , is semtiotics , as a field of study , as an oppressive system , something we've made up in the 20th century or have semiotical regimes been part of our human tendencies for centuries if not aeons ? (is it totally animal to assign meaning to form ? this big thing = danger = run away or fight... yes! fright=fly or fight) this violence you say , which i totally agree with , that spurts from taxonomic and therefore reductionist desires (when we use our finger to point and name , it's so phallic and dominant) , is rather ancient no ? so my question is , are semiotical tendencies , to reduce form to univocal and unambiguous meaning , a part of our 'nature' ? or did we learn it ? hmm what do you think? i bring this up because the mere visuality , the outline , of a body is what makes the signals most humans receive optically and cerebrally determine whether we think something is or is not a body ... is this one of your (Femke, you and the other beloved companions) core points ? 

*i don't know where i saw it , i think in a bugs bunny or loony tunes cartoon when i was really young , maybe fantasia , but there was this moment where a silhouette of a body , which made us the audience think "oh it must be a body" , tranformed into a series of other things ... in other words , what we had determined as a singular , normative , symmetrical body , all of a sudden disconfigured , tranformed , if not blossomed into several multiple bodies like magic ; similar to when we play with shadow puppets , two hands with a light projected behind it cast a shadow on the wall that looks like a deer or a mouse or a wolf or a bear ... it's curious that when the body is bent and abstracted , this happens with playful , ludic intentions like in the cartoons ... shadow puppets are folkloric games , ancient ... the whole village would be captivated how two hands could make such a variety of body-appearances ... Affective Vessels' contribution to all of this would be the urge for dreaming ... i still ask the question : why , when we have the blessed propensity to do so , do we restrict dreaming and abstraction only to ludic circumstance ? movies , games , make-believe , magic shows , daydreaming etc. ? similar to all this , the current talk regarding utopia is related : we have to believe that it is real , and possible , keep dreeaming towards harmony and embracing ... it takes imagination , dreaming to acheive utopia , not strategy , not semiotics , and not capitalism ... it's funny when our senses are 'tricked' or even limited , if we have to use our hands in the dark to figure out what we have before us , it's a ludically-dynamised relationality with the world's subjects , and not as reductionist as we can't have all of the sensorial information at once (sight , smell , touch , sound that help us say "yes this is a body") ... how can this sensory-deprivation game help us carress new possibilities to relate to a range of possible bodies ? sad that people who are func
tionally diverse have been considered "disfunctional" when in fact , the rerouting the body does of the senses when sight or hearing may not be """"""perfect"""""" actually helps the body be more attuned to the world and the multiple possibilities it births given that making a determinate "yes this is a body" kind of answer doesn't come so dominantly ...

*j :
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*yes, as affects can also be quite negative, deadly, blocking and flattening, can't they? I mean, it's all about the encounter between more-than-one modes of existence, ones affecting the others and hence also being affected by them. In that sense, this project implies a very deep response-ability to not just take affect in a benevolent sense but rather assume its levels of complexity, interdependcence and implicancy (to quote Denise Ferreira da Silva).
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