Swerve/Tropos
That which slightly overtakes us is also, because of our agency, because of the
clinamen of our action, slightly overtaken, modified… I never act; I am always slightly
surprised by what I do. That which acts through me is also surprised by what I do, by the
chance to mutate, to change, and to bifurcate, the chance that I and the circumstances
surrounding me offer to that which has been invented, recovered, welcomed.
—Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope
Tropos is a video installation made up of two films, Exotropos and Tropeis. The films show an action filmed from opposite angles, with the videos projected back-to-back, one on each side of a piece of linen suspended in the middle of the room. In Exotropos, meaning “outside turn,” we see petals on a linen cloth; a body slips under the shroud and wriggles and writhes, throwing the petals above it into motion. The form is alive, clearly a body, but it isn’t always clearly human. The video is set in reverse, and the relationship of cause and effect between the body and the petals is turned around. In Tropeis, “into the turn,” we have the same piece of fabric and the same petals, but viewed from underneath, from the point of view of the body. Of the body we see only the hands and arms, turned upward, facing the fabric, unlike in the first video, where the body faces the ground. This side of the cloth is not in reverse, but it has been slowed so that the petals’ movements, which normally would last barely a second and would be almost indistinguishable, are long enough that we can follow them more closely and see them as singular entities.
In both films, time is bent in such a way that actions and their consequences are enhanced and made new. In Exotropos, time is set backwards, effect coming before cause and seemingly taking its place, the petal’s swooping leap somehow forcing the shroud to fall backward. Expected actions are made strange, uncanny, though we may not at first understand why; and in that uncanniness we are called to pay attention to the action, to the cause and effect, in a new way. In Tropeis, time is slowed to a speed that would be impossible for the human body to uphold for the duration of the video’s eleven minutes and details we wouldn’t have noticed at a “normal” speed emerge. Again, the causal action is emphasized; the eye, now able to follow every unfolding instant, made newly aware of the gesture, movement, weight, and colors, and of the interplay between the hands and the suspended linen leading the petals to cascade in one direction or another.
In Anthropocene Poetics, David Farrier discusses what Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius called the clinamen, the swerve of atoms toward or away from one another. Taken to a larger scale, the clinamen is something that all animals, and arguably all living things to the extent of their ability, experience at all times in response to the matter and stimulus they encounter. It is the action through which we make contact or through which we avoid it, with varying degrees of awareness. As we move through life, we operate within the tension of the clinamen, between the toward and the away, caught in the constant pull of potential contact or distance — and always that of consequence. As Farrier tells us, “the swerve is the necessary turn or deviation that tangles life in knots of kin-making” (90). Without it there is no meeting, no connection; even when we turn away, we are heading in another direction, and into another potential point of contact. We are always, in sum, heading toward something.
The petals, moving away from the body (or toward it in the case of Exotropos), arrive together momentarily in colorful swarms, only to swerve once more, collectively or alone, in one direction or many, toward and away. The body, beneath the cloth that separates it from the objects with which it engages, swerves toward the petals, and yet body and petals never arrive at a common point of stasis. The petals, weighing down the fabric, suspended on all sides and plunging toward the ground, refuse to stay still as the body shifts, as the hands glaze. In each movement the interplay of clinamen and consequence is condensed, the swerve’s wave ongoing in the ever folding and unfolding plenum.
Contact and the senses are key in both pieces of the Tropos diptych. The hands traveling across the linen, the sound of the wriggling body blending with that of the shifting petals… The piece seeks to enliven in the viewer a visceral memory of the tactile and cause-and-effect encounters of our daily lives. In order to enhance the full-body sensory experience, the petals seen in the videos are strewn on the floor of the gallery, underneath and around the projections, bringing in scent and touch. The films are projected on the very linen cloth seen in the video, as though they and the petals were pulled out of the film, from inside out, or outside in. Exotropos, the “outside” film, is projected on one side on the linen, and Tropeis, the “inside” film, on the other, giving viewers the experience not only of the camera’s point of view, but also leading them in a sort of dance that mirrors that of the body, the fabric, and the petals in the videos. As they go from one projection to the other, their movement becomes a swerve in its own right, between inside and outside, toward and away.
As we watch the Tropos videos, swerving between the inside and outside perspectives, we are made to question our own body and our own involvement, to think of our own experience of the clinamen, both in relationship to the piece and in the global web of participants. How does our body, how do our gestures affect the things around us? How do our movements influence the piece, altering the projection as the atoms of air that we cause to swerve shift the hanging linen? How willing are we to participate, and how willing are we to pay attention to our participation in the world? What does that participation imply?
With each action and each decision we swerve on the threshold of ourselves, at what poet David Whyte calls the “frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you” (“Lyrical” 01:13), a space where we are not only made more aware of the world around us but of our own selves as well. In Anthropocene Poetics, Farrier speaks of what Deborah Bird Rose called the “longing for others,” which he describes as “both a call from without to enter into connection and a reorienting pull from within the body” (Farrier 90). In every instant, the body, engaging in interplays of weight and gesture, swerving, is simultaneously called out of itself to come into contact with another and is brought back in, the tension of the clinamen reaching both far outward and deep inside. To come into contact with another is to become cognizant of our own existence, to be made real. We are not fully ourselves without others, nor do we fully exist; as Whyte puts it, “untouched, we disappear” (Consolations 223). “We become who we are in the company of other beings,” Rose writes, and in the sway of “life’s eros” we are drawn “to turn toward self, to turn toward others” (qtd. in Farrier 93). While the clinamen is the visceral swerve that determines our relationship with others, from inside out, it also brings us back to ourselves, from outside in, making us “newly strange” to ourselves (Farrier 91).