^{point to touch, to touchpoint
fall low up lands, low fall lands up
you resemble the wall, you resemble the garden}

point to touch... is a site-responsive, reconfigurable installation by the artist collective nonhumanities.

Our aim is to produce a structure that looks but does not function like a maze: we wish to open up the maze's one limited mode of understanding and participation (i.e., single-narrative, goal-directed exploration) to allow for plural forms of understanding and participation. We also wish to undo the top-down design process of the maze by building into the structures modular and movable sections, such that the public is involved in the co-creation of the space, the co-shaping of multiple narrative pathways, and by extension the co-authorship of their fellow participants' experience. And finally, we wish to uncouple the key sensory tactic of the maze — disorientation — from the goal-directedness of the maze so that disorientation might instead be a productive vector for leisurely wonder, desire, and fantasy.

In addition to being participatory and reconfigurable, our installation is activated by a series of improvised performances sourced from the responsive and playful movement proposals of attendees in and around the ‘maze’. A sole performer moves throughout the space during the duration of the festival, confusing the boundary between reactor and actant inside the installation. The resulting durational performance simultaneously archives and stimulates emerging modes of gathering, inhabiting, and relating.

Embedded in the structure is a series of video installations of performances at different maze sites throughout Virginia and Maryland (Estouteville Farm, Luray Caverns, etc.), featuring processes of relation bewteen human, nearly human, and nonhuman subjects. The videos critically engage with the varied histories of the maze, particularly its tie to moral narratives and its role in choreographing and thus codifying acceptable forms of human behavior and movement through space.

Our foremost desire for this installation and performance series is to propagate possibilities for unsettled gatherings. Through experiential, embodied engagement we aim to develop in participants new attunements to the ways spatial genres like the maze choreograph movement, curate behavior, promote or complicate sociality, express dynamics of cooperation and power, enable the imagination of narratives, and allow us to feel acute forms of alienation, community, tenderness, and play.

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nonhumanities is an art collective consisting of Conrad Cheung, Anna Hogg, and Katie Schetlick. nonhumanities works at the social and affective intersections of body, play, narrative, architecture, and interspecies living.

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SCHEDULE of installations:

Early October: Ruffin Hall, 3rd floor patio entrance, Charlottesville, VA

November 3-4: InLight Festival 2023, Richmond, VA

more TBD

stills from fall low up lands, / low fall lands up
multichannel video, loop