MATTER IN FLUX emerged in 2018 as an educational and knowledge building axis attached to The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO). We are a group of artists, curators, theorists, and health practitioners dedicated to critical analysis, sociological inquiry, debate, and collective writing. Inherent to our group’s research line and interrogative approach are: politically enmeshed scientific affairs in ecological politics and policy, economies of transition, history of science, material studies, and feminist ecopoetics.

MATTER IN FLUX is currently led by Jennifer Teets, convener, in collaboration with group members. It is premised on the notion that in order to respond to emergent political and ecological challenges we need to broaden our channels of exchange. Research, reading, and analysis requires time, and in the current work panorama which most of us co-inhabit today there is seldom enough of it. Establishing modes of inquiry can lead to a better understanding of our world and how we can step back and reflect. Posing questions also helps us to observe, and meditate on, how our environments are mutating, under which circumstances, while triggering steps for future action.

Our intention is that the MATTER IN FLUX online study group will probe these conditions. Broadly, it will look at the history of materiality and examine the scientific criteria that sets matter into motion, so as to grant agency to social inquiry and conceptual labor. MATTER IN FLUX pays particular attention to language, form, and fluidity in material politics, metabolic transactions, and various degrees of ‘trans species and trans material transformation’. Fiction, poetry, and literary theory play a fundamental role in our group and study. MATTER IN FLUX writes collectively and produces text work for exhibition and publication; engages in self organized online writing intensives scheduled at different periods across the year.

So far we’ve hosted author Esther Leslie, theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth K. Povinelli, life sciences historian Barbara Orland, sociologist Tim Ingold, writer Elvia Wilk, philosopher Michael Marder, human geographer Kai Bosworth, writer Anne Boyer, anthropologist Eben Kirksey, artist Laurie Palmer, etc, to present their research and engage with a literary text of their choice.

In 2020, we exhibited at CAC, Vilnius and led two intensives around the work of epidemiologist Rob Wallace and theorist Sylvia Federici in addition to our usual activities. In 2021 we released Electric Brine published by Archive Books featuring writers and poets Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker, and Lisa Robertson. Read this interview to learn more.

We are currently exploring the possibility of touchdown events in different art and research centers. Dates and partners will be announced soon.