Making Encounters: Witnessing the sociality of things and places

My research considers how art practices form dynamic relations with “things” and places. More specifically, this paper maps approaches in which human agency is quieted in order to privilege the agencies of things in art making. Practices that utilise witnessing, finding and improvising are explored, where methods turn away from more traditional, human centric sculptural approaches. I propose that an important shift in art practices hinges on the difference between “making-with” a thing, material or place, as opposed to “making-from”. The art practices I foreground are contextualised by Bruno Latour’s ‘actants’ (Latour, 2005), Tim Ingold’s writing on making (Ingold, 2013, 2000), Jane Bennett’s conceptions of ‘vibrant materialism’ (Bennett, 2010, 2001) and by the Involuntary Sculptures (1933) published in the Surrealist journal Minotuare (Deleuze and Kelly, 2013).