Intermedial collaboration for more than human worlds.

Art-based research project by Aura Arreola, MFA- UNAM (2022-2024)

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Photos by: Manuel Enriquez & Fili Gibbons.

Collages for Unfading by Aura Arreola with photographies of David Joshua Jennings.

Radical Intimacies is an art-based research that proposes to challenge traditional notions of intimacy in order to speculate on new affective configurations - not just human - that are more reciprocal, honest and generative.

Drawing on the theoretical assumptions of relational ontologies, the affective turn, and new materialisms, I attempt to construct a notion of non-human intimacy based on interdependencies, collaborations, and the reciprocal "becoming with" of bodies, materials, and places.

Intimacy is then proposed not only as a micro-political force, but also as an aesthetic one, in search of possible alternatives to the modes of subjectivation under the domination of the colonial-capitalist unconscious, as well as the reinvention of our usual - and not very generative - ways of relating to ourselves, to others and to the world.

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1 Becoming-with is a term used by Donna Harraway to emphasize what is missing in Deleuze’s becoming: the fact that we always become in collaboration and thanks to so many other humans, multiple species, ancestors, and beings.