TACTILE AFFERENTS

2023, single-channel video, b/w, sound, 6’30”

Courtesy of Joanna Piotrowska, Formafantasma, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

JOANNA PIOTROWSKA

Joanna Piotrowska (1985, Poland) examines the human condition through performative acts and the construction of multiple ‘social landscapes’ using photography, performance and film. Family archives, self-defence manuals and psychotherapeutic methods are used as reference points as Piotrowska explores the complex roles which play out in everyday performance. Her psychologically charged works probe human behaviour and the dynamics of familial relations, exploring intimacy, violence, control, and self-protection. The artist reveals moments of care as well as hierarchies of power, anxieties, and imposed conventions that play out in the domestic sphere.

FORMAFANTASMA

Formafantasma (2009, Italy/The Netherlands) is a research-based design studio investigating the ecological, historical, political and social forces shaping the discipline of design today. Whether designing for a client or developing self-initiated projects, the studio applies the same rigorous attention to context, processes and details. Formafantasma’s analytical nature translates in meticulous visual outcomes, products and strategies.

Tactile Afferents (2023) is conceived as a filmic journey through touch and gestures, proximity and feel, primary modes of communication between beings—humans and sheep—that cannot relate verbally with each other. This film aims to take the viewer where human words have no power, to a space where persuasion passes through the hands, where power is administered thermally, transmitted through the temperature of the palms.
Certain maneuvers belong to the vocabulary of domestication, others are less descriptive and more mysterious. Touch morphs from the familiar into the unfamiliar. Despite its quasi-compilatory structure, Tactile Afferents is not a directory of gestures, nor is it an atlas of domestication poses. Of this polysemy of materials and gestures, forms of contact and tactile politics, Tactile Afferents assumes all the complexity, projecting it onto the relationship between humans and sheep. Many of the actions are extremely codified and have survived for centuries, adapted from the rural dimension of coexistence between humans and animals to the current industrial scale of wool production.
Tactile Afferents conceptualizes touch as a way of getting closer to the unknown, as a form of knowledge, as the hope for a new lingua franca between species. It is a film that explores the very space around it as we would do ourselves upon entering a room with no light, making our way with our hands.