“In her essay “Encounters with an Art-Thing” (2015), Jane Bennett explains how her theory of vibrant matter can be applied to art, specifically to artworks exhibited in museums. following the publication of Vibrant Matter [Materia vibrante, Caja Negra, 2022] – her book on political ecology that posits a different way of considering the relationship between humans and the world they inhabit – Bennett recounts that she was invited to a dinner to discuss how works of art undergo transformations when affected by different forces. She argues that the concept of “vibrant matter” can be used to overcome traditional subject-object and human-non-human dichotomies and to consider how all matter, human and non-human, has the capacity to affect and be affected.
During that dinner, Bennett remarked that works of art not only transform and are transformed by their environment, but also by the humans that observe them. She thus questions at what point a piece of art (transformed, broken, reworked) begins or ceases to be art, and how much of that process is due to human action. I propose to use this same theoretical approach in my analysis of Máquina Teatro: El Periférico de Objetos (1990-2009) [Theatre Machine: El Periférico de Objetos (1990–2009)], one of the exhibitions that is part of the Museo Moderno’s Arte es Teatro [Art Is Theatre] programme. I will begin by asking whether, in the exhibition, the theatrical works can be understood as agency in which humans and objects create through a mutual affect-effect relationship.
Working with the museum’s Curatorial Department and the research team that focuses on cinema, theatre and experimental music, I want to learn more about the curatorial and management processes behind this exhibition on El Periférico de Objetos. By doing so, I hope to reconstruct the creative process and understand the decisions leading up to the exhibition from a perspective that considers that the objects (both the ready-made dolls as well as other pieces from the archive) affected the humans making these decisions, in a kind of push-and-pull dynamic. I will begin by asking: What do the dolls (and other archival materials) remember? How do the previous agency in which the objects took part affect the current exhibition, the agency I wish to analyse? How do humans open themselves up to working with objects in order to create with them?
In this sense, I am looking for a deeper understanding of museum curatorship from the perspective of the theory of vibrant matter and wish to further develop existing lines of analysis and explore the possibilities that the theory of vibrant matter offers for thinking about the arts. I will then write an account of the experience that draws on these processes.”
Guadalupe Garione (Córdoba, Argentina, 1999) holds a degree in Modern Literature and is a professor of that same subject in addition to working as a literary editor, having graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. She currently studies the links between the human and non-human in the convivial arts, from the perspective of new materialism. She has published several articles on the subject in different academic journals. She is part of the research team that works under the title ‘Traducciones de lo autorreferencial en dramaturgias de Córdoba en el siglo XXI. Parte II’ [‘Translations of the self-referential in 21st-century drama in Córdoba. Part II’] (SECYT-UNC), led by Dr. Laura Fobbio and Dr. Germán Brignone. She is also a secondary and higher education teacher, as well as a proofreader and editor at Bosquemadura E-ditorial de Arte.