Braiding Dislocated Lives: A collaborative video exploring ‘what’s happening’ under COVID

We have co-created a multimedia work by beginning with braided stories on "what’s presently happening" through the colour blue. Through painting, sound scaping, videography, writing, making, montaging and deconstructing we respond to ‘what’s happening’ and to each other’s responses in entangled and diffractive ways. We are sensorially present, attuned and make/think with matters and beings in our lived spaces in attempts to make sense of ‘what’s happening’.

Drawing from Haraway’s (1992) proposal of diffraction as a metaphoric means for mapping material-semiotic interference patterns, this project will use diffractive analysis to “map where the effects of differences appear” (p. 300). Barad (2007) further proposes diffraction as a critical tool for “reading insights through one another” (p. 25), enabling multiple and diverse perspectives to be elicited through differing meaning-making, including the diffraction of narratives, images, poetics, theories, the political, the spiritual, the sociocultural, and so on. We play with “diffractive storying” (Phillips, 2020) following the entangled effects that diffractive differences make. Blue-ness is vitalistic multiplicity where “non-unitary identities and multiple allegiances” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 144) with-ness each other. We are there for each other, we the subjects, we the co-creators, we the dis-located scholars who patiently braid the threads, who weave (Haraway, 2016, p. 91) the four colourful lines of thought: w h a t - i s - g o i n g - o n ?