Two Walks with Objects

Abstract

‘Two Walks With Objects’ attempts a tainted auto-ethnographic review of the affects and actions arising from reviewing the images remaining from two walks with objects, the first in 2013 and the second in 2017. The article sets out, within the context of a growing discussion about the agency of unhuman and nonhuman things and a refinement of neo-vitalist and object-based ontology, to narrate affect within an archive against the effects of memory, triangulating these not with a third human source, but with the absence of the things themselves, which are present only as written descriptions and photographic representations. By framing the walks as everyday performances, the article seeks then to use a critique of documentation of performance as transforming performance into something else as an efficacious model, identifying the ‘voids’ of mythogeographical practice as that “something else”, as potential spaces where human actors can learn to live with the agency of nonhuman objects.