Gravitational Feel is an engine for intensifying the differentiation of our entanglement, which you continually reprogramme in the mutual rub, shift and lap of its sonic, wooden, steel, textile and human material.

“Gravitational Feel is a kinetic sculptural performance. It is activated in movement and touch, in the mutual rub, shift and lap of its sonic, wooden, steel, textile and human material. As you mix the sound, in your movement in and across a circle formed by (squared) speakers, the ropes move, becoming strings in having been brushed and strummed by you. In their turn, in the turning of the rotaries from which they fall, the strings move you with their touch, just as in touching one another you move one another, either directly or by the messages you send from strand to strand. In this way, Gravitational Feel is an engine for intensifying the differentiation of our entanglement, continually programming itself through incalculable combinations of disruption and convergence. Your movements, which are neither destructive nor curatorial, are both deconstruction and cure. Therefore, Wu and Fred kindly request your steadfastly refraining from any attempt to be still.” – Wu Tsang & Fred Moten

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.

“Friendship is a series of ‘spooky actions at a distance’ – the smaller the distance, the spookier the actions become.” – Fred Moten