New
Materialism

Transversal Practices focuses on how things, subjects, collectives, politics and disciplines are in the making; how they take-form and transform in relation to other elements, both human and nonhuman. Transversal Practices are concerned with ecologies where intensities of movement are aligned with and embrace hands-on attitude and artistic, scientific, ethnographical, philosophical and activist praxis.

We offer three keywords to inspire thinking and to carve out the specificities of practice. Matter refers to ubiquitous, vibrant and continuous becoming that is one of the central concerns of New Materialism: practices are always material, and surprising in nature. Ecology indicates an open and continuously transforming system, which depends upon how its components relate to each other. Relationality, for its part, is the moving principle of being in the world, or with the world. We become in relation to others. We co-emerge, as do artworks, ideas and collectives.

We question: How do transversal practices work and how can we account or conceptualise them? What kind of methodologies do they necessitate, or call for?

We encourage critical approaches that transversally cross the following: collectivity, corporeality/incorporeality, materiality/immateriality, indigeneity, individual/ group subjectivity, knowledge-production/onto-epistemologies, language, temporality, transdisciplinarity, processes of making art/philosophy/ activism, and the three Ss—spatiality, sociality and the sensorium.

The NewMats2015 Conference is sponsored by the Faculty of the VCA and MCM at the University of Melbourne in co-operation with ISCH COST Action New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’