Gravitational Feel is a sculpture-performance by Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, who together cohabit the roles of poet and performance artist. The work continues their collaboration on the poetics of intimacy and is a research-experiment into how to sense entanglement. Using fabric and sound, Gravitational Feel produces a series of ‘chance events’ as an experiment in blurring the social and physical significance of touch and voice, as well as questions of space and time in matter. 

 

What if the feel of a poem was not just emotional, but tactile? How do we sense entanglement? Can the knotting of ropes according to a poem’s rhythm make the social pulse of language matter? 

 

Tangentially: Gravitational Feel makes you wonder about Incan Khipu. When they first encountered them, European colonists thought Khipu (also known as ‘talking knots’: collections of multi-coloured, knotted ropes) were number systems used for administrative purposes like taxation or census, or in military campaigns. Indigenous scholars now believe they had a much richer, more linguistic use of number, capable of transmitting administrative information but also mapping pilgrimage routes or acting as memory tools in retelling oral histories. In movement, the knotted ropes of Gravitational Feel allude toward these differences between how Western and Indigenous minds understood number, matter and language.