Unfolding space: an allotropic dance in three parts for two players [Abstract]

We propose an Allotropic Dance as a paper/project of fragmentary visions to explore the interactions (in)between articulation and unfolding space, as might be configured through process, fluidity and our resonant, generative awareness of the creative and seductive potential of ambiguous and elusive coordinates. Adapting some steps from Haraway and Butler, the project stretches ‘articulation’ and ‘materialisation’ beyond representational stasis, toward contingency, connection and desiring agency/desirous verve – the very possibility of an open-ended future. From our sense (following our senses) we will suggest that articulate spaces are not so much defined as they are unfolding, emergent, perhaps hidden, and becoming. Our careful expression refocuses defining space from the identification and description of boundaries, to an attentive engagement with how those boundaries have been made, and how we might articulate them ‘otherwise’ in future. The project is an aesthetic intervention through this territory, bringing art, theory, subjects and politics into a dialogic dance. We introduce allotropism (‘other manner’) to our dance, as the manifestation of multiple modes of a single element at one and the same moment (diamonds, graphite)... (continues)