In the early 1980’s the Italian women’s movement saw the birth of ‘Affidamento’, a relational practice divergent from the second wave feminist focus on horizontality and equality. This practice of entrustment embraced different levels of competency, fostering a collective and supportive view of difference. Describing a relationship between two women, where each uses her talents, competences, and desires to open new political spaces for the other. In response to the calls for institutional reform and mass campaigns for political equality at that time by the larger women's movement, affidamento as a practice adopted an almost diffractive methodology towards feminist politics. The perspective was shifted inward to focus on interpersonal relationships and alterity, in a lesson of collective organisation and ideological potential

What would this idea look like translated to a modern day context, in the shadow of identity politics and polarisation? As fluid unfixed bodies, can we leak to fill the crevices of others and expect the same in return? Porous puzzles in a constant push and pull of affect, inhaled and exhaled by one another. Perhaps there’s potential in assemblage through otherness.

‘For there to be rhythm, movement must be felt. Rhythmicity, as the philosopher Henri Lefebvre argues, implies not just repetition but differences within repetition.Thus there is no rhythm in the perfectly iterative rotations of the mechanical cutter. The mechanism feels nothing and is wholly unresponsive to what is going on while it rotates. The same is true of the oscillations of the pendulum or metronome. Iteration is metronomic, itineration rhythmic.’

Tim Ingold, Textility: 98

‘The senses sharpen on the surfaces of things taking form. They pick up texture and density as they move in and through bodies and spaces, rhythms and tempi, possibilities likely or not. They establish trajectories that shroud and punctuate the significance of sounds, textures, and movements.’

Kathleen Stewart, Attunements: 448

fat crow watches as little bodies climb down one by one by one
trails of lively dots ascending and descending the cliff side
below black ants mimic the movements
coming and going from their hidden hills
fine sheets of sun cut through the hanging branches
striking you and me and us and them
the bright light has filled cup of life brimful
air buzzing with the bountiful promise of spring
the winter is long before over but some days in around here
would make you forget that
air cold greetings warm
I sit and watch as a porpoise breaks through the water top
again and again and again
gliding grey body
fluid and inseparable from the
substance in which it swims
tracks shudder somewhere behind me
the sound reaches out touching my back
as a carriage
clutters past
the same train that used to
shuttle my body
to and from school
I can feel my face
pressed against the glass
then
entranced by the oscillating ocean