Hevi Metle1

These are bodies composite. Held in turns they draw around the links and fold on heat and

find their way to forms that have not burned her yet. Undetermined, indolent/ under influenceof heat.

Figures: finding metal as her touch makes chains for which I find no other word. Weight is heard, pulled from side to centre under bodies taking shape.

All in fascination, strange and brute and full. These are bodies in relation made to matter/mean. [1]

This is a performance and its interpretation. Thought is born of metal more than stone and-a vital state of matter - she is/will be seen. [2]

Hot now, she will touch herself. Relays: I am made of metal forged and this is not deceit. Pressed, I am made with complication as a bond.

Matters: all unstable/ flows. In emerging says, I am not explained/away. Hers are cracks and close and these are all events. She crawls.

I am catching my way up, she says. I will lay with fire. Cleaving more or less and following another, holding to herself.

This is all reliant, alloyed/composed of bodies in endeavor, under force and time. [3]

There is little else, affect, local movement, pace. This is energetic, overspills the point. She says, I am not determined, will not yet tell a form,

I have not been quenched. [4]

This is a slip/the slip/way in. A dance: matters in and bearing/ bending state. There is

cadence made to shape.

Matters she will make herself, I see them dragging on the floor. These links will find noclose.

We are held together this is over/used has lost meaning found articulation/ making sound.

She is heaving now. Here and howling words collapse and fail/fall/hit on other bodies that will make and hear them out. Figure/form: an others word lost against the turning of the rest.

I am told: this is retaliation. Am told: they are not here now. These bodies will not burn.

Press it to the fire, she says. I have burned before, I will not again. I have made myself of metal. I will not be fixed.

Only, her cheeks burn, this is elemental/she is not contrite. She says my body contains blood baths, how will you care for it?

This is becoming/a new force. [5]

Becomes/shaped in its relation to her step. A chain is dropped, they dance. She will touch herself/enfold, this is an involution. [6]

This is an entanglement. This is touching and re-turn, a matter of response. [7]

Pressed and seeks escape from this compression, a cause of violent motion. How long before it breaks?

She says, I store a total history. Fire becomes violent when it is checked and pent.

We are screaming/sing. This is not divine, an invocation. Says, I am heavy, golden, now: this is just (a bringing to) of life. This is repetition/she repairs and hers is a body of knowledge.

Says, I am coming into parts. This is obligation. [8]

Care: a troubling of ourselves.

Hevi Metle2

[1] Matter enjoys its own capacities for self—transformation, rather than awaiting the imposition of form or meaning by an external, transcendent agent.

Diana Coole, ‘From Within the Midst of Things: New Sensibility, New Alchemy, and the Renewal of Critical Theory’, in Realism Materialism Art, ed. by Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (Berlin: Sternberg Pr, 2015), pp.41-46 (p.43)

[2] What metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden… Metal is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy… Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p.411

[3] Metal is always metallurgical, always an alloy of the endeavours of many bodies, always something worked on… The desire of the craftsperson to see what a metal can do, rather than the desire of the scientist to know what a metal is, enabled the former to discern a life in metal.

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), p.60

[4] Being is not simply present, there to be found, already given… Mattering is about the (contingent and temporary) becoming—determinate (and becoming—indeterminate) ofmatter and meaning, without fixity, without closure.

Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/ Continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today, 3.2 (2010), pp.240–68 (p.254)

[5] A reciprocal, irreducible process of becoming, where bodies and other materials are conjoined in a shared artistry… that emphasizes materialization as a dynamic process (wherein matter matters itself) rather than a state.

Diane Coole, p.43

[6] Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself.

Karen Barad, ‘On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, Differences, 23.3 (2012), pp.206–23 (p.213)

[7] Touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability. Touching is a matter of response. Each of “us” is constituted in response- ability. Each of “us” is constituted as responsible for the other, as the other.

Karen Barad, ‘On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, p.215

[8] Entanglements are relations of obligation—being bound to the other—enfolded traces of othering… “Otherness” is an entangled relation of difference (différance).

Karen Barad, ‘On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, p.217

Hevi Metle4

Kiah Endelman Music is an artist and writer based in Glasgow, whose practice attempts to find an elusive history of sensation in the spaces between art and writing, matter and thought, between bodies and the spaces they inhabit.

Louise Ahl is a Glasgow-based artist originally from Sweden, making experimental and choreographic performance work. She creates both solo and collaborative multi-art-form pieces under the guise of Ultimate Dancer.

A Tramway co-production with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Hevi Metle takes shape as a repetitive, repeated and ongoing choreographic saga which explores transformation, mysticism, resistance and retaliation through matter and form. The work was first performed at Tramway on 12 October 2019 as part of Dance International Glasgow, and will be re-presented at BALTIC on 12 February 2020, 14:00- 20:00. The performance is free, drop-in.