Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Nina Lykke
The paper will take a point of departure in a poem, Signs (Lykke 2022) which I wrote while intensely mourning the death of my lesbian life partner - as a poetic-philosophical meditation on events for which the terms immanent miracles and miraculous gifts so to speak ’imposed’ themselves on me. When using the word ’imposed’, I refer to a contradiction. On the one hand, my otherwise rationalistic, feminist atheist mindset would tell me that I cheated myself when hoping for spectral returns and miraculous signs from my dead beloved. On the other hand, the poem accounts for a series of intuitive experiences which made me feel that I was being miraculously given gifts in a very materially real way, which I shall define as spiritmattering - with reference to feminist posthumanist and indigenous theorist Felicia Amaya Schaeffer (Schaeffer 2018) and her analysis of the work of queerfeminist and indigenous philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa (Anzaldúa 2015), as well as to immance philosophy and vitalist materialism. In the paper, I shall, in particular, focus on my relation to the spiritmattering assemblage which makes up the watery place, a big fjord in the Northern part of Denmark, where my beloved’s ashes are scattered. I shall speculatively wonder whether or not it makes sense to understand the experiences, which my mourning practices unfolding at this place have led to, from the perspective of being miraculously given gifts.
Nina Lykke, Professor Emerita, Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and Aarhus University, Denmark, is a queerfemme-inist philosopher-poet. Current research: queer death studies, intersectionality, feminist posthumanism, queerfemme theory, queer ecologies; poetic writing. Author of numerous articles and monographs such as Cosmodolphins (2000), Feminist Studies (2010), Vibrant Death (2022 ) and Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters (2024, with K. Aglert and L. Henriksen)