Performing Bitumen: Materialising Desiré

“Performing Bitumen: Materialising Desiré” in Architectural Materialisms: Nonhuman Creativity. Ed. Voyatzaki M., Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

Bit-u-men-at-work is part of an ongoing series of works by Preston that seek to explore the limits between human and nonhuman agency in order to reveal the vibrancy in materials.2 This iterative and emergent practice of material ethics experiments with various performative modes in the hope of fostering alternative relationships with earthly substances deemed inert by philosophical and social constructs. Preston’s work is particularly concerned with the vital or vibrant surfaces of our living environments whereby surface is positioned as a spatio-temporal situatedness emerging out of the intraactions between material subjects, a concept borrowed from Karen Barad.3 Employing ecofeminist and new materialist strategies that aim to undo patriarchal and anthropocentric hierarchies, the work takes notice of the complex assemblages of our living environments while seeking to explore not just how we as humans might live in them, but how they, themselves, might live.