Diffractive Methodologies for Postnatural Worlding
This artistic-research project proposes worlding as a methodology for site-specific interventions through
a performative materialist approach. It proposes an imagination of multiple passages of time that exist in
a place. Through worlding, these forms of time become visible as implicated in the co-constitutive
agency it shares with the place, thus allowing the non-homogenous trajectories of time to shape the
multiple futures of the place.
Our understanding of future is dependent on our context-bound notion of time, which is formulated by the
worlds and lives we have access to. The idea of access also implicates the sensorium through which
worlds are perceived. Worlding provides us with the tools to imagine these multiple forms of time that
make a moment in space through diagramming the complex juxtaposition of relationships and
materiality. Kathleen Stewart provides a definition of worlding referring to the "affective nature" of the
world in which "non-human agency" comprising of "forms, rhythms and refrains" (for example) reach a
point of "expressivity" for an individual and develop a sense of "legibility". 1 We will use spatial diagrams
of spaces to record both these expressions as they exist on site, and ways to make them legible as they
need to be communicated to stakeholders.
We will use Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology as an 'ethico-onto-epistemological engagement
attending to differences and matters of care in all their detail, in order to creatively repattern world-
making practices'. Diffractive methodology is a post-representational approach to data analysis. We will
work with existing site documentations for design projects and re-read them diffractively with other
contextual material to note the possibilities such documentation can offer for critical spatial practices.
