Photograph by Rodrigo Hill, Ngarunui, 2022.
Our human lives are inseparable from and intimately entangled with the lives of all of the more-than-human world, including non-human material agents like oceans, forests, rocks, soil, atmospheric gases, water, trees, birds, mammals, sea creatures and so on. Karen Barad’s agential realism frames this inherent inseparability and agency of all materiality in the world, and Barad writes that even if we humans have forgotten our ‘companions’, the world holds the memory of our entanglements (Barad, 2007). Refer to Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
Together with different collaborators, I have been researching artistic ways to reveal these entanglements.
Entanglements in the Anthropocene, with Dr Rodrigo Hill. Exhibition of first series in ‘Malleable Boundaries (2024-2025 Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, Hamilton, New Zealand). https://rodrigohill.com/projects/entanglements-in-the-anthropocene/ Article forthcoming.
Taku Rākau: People-tree entanglements, with Professor Te Kahautu Maxwell, Professor Margaret Barbour and tōhunga Danie Pohipi, in association with members of Te Whānau-a-Apanui and Te Whakatōhea. Documentary ‘Taku Rākau: People-Pine Entanglements‘ completed. Article published in The Global South journal: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/908606
Dr Karen Barbour 