Reclamation Ground: Material Reckoning with Gendered Subjectivity through Site-Responsive Art Practice

This research enquiry has tested and established a sequence of practice-based methods, as Reclamation Ground, to question what a critical reclamation of female subjectivity might mean, and how it might manifest, through a feminist site responsive art practice. The Reclamation Ground sequence involves a deconstruction of a material encounter with site that responds to each site’s varying parameters. Physical, geological, cultural, material and historical properties are interrogated, primarily through an autoethnographic methodology and through an excavation of material from each encounter. Digital technology is positioned as an intra-active agent throughout the Reclamation Ground sequence, a virtual tool for reimagining, speculating and becoming in response to the sites physically encountered. A process of material reckoning is formulated through a studio-based reconstitution of these excavated materials, transforming ground into new ‘aggregates’ to reveal critical territories of gendered subjectivity. These reckonings are subsequently terraformed as new artworks in a gallery context, formulating critical feminist renderings of subjectivity through encounters and reckonings with site. This site-responsive research enquiry has formulated a material language that has activated three metaphorical Reclamation Grounds exploring alternative manifestations of female subjectivity. At their most provocative, these new formulations enabled a transformative process of change that questions the very grounds of subjectivity. Reclamation Ground One focuses on rupturing the stymied representations of female subjectivity in Hollywood cinema in response to the desert through a tech grotesque aesthetic. Reclamation Ground Two focuses on psychological female subjectivities in a decrepit hotel room through the collective voices of #MeToo. In Reclamation Ground Three, the site of a disused quarry is encountered materially, bodily and affectively using technologies, and a disjuncture from patriarchal constructions is revealed via the birthing body. The subjectivities that manifested in this final iteration of Reclamation Ground are multiple, trans corporeal, intra-active, affective, symbiotic and completely entangled with the more-than-human. Reclamation Ground thus formulates a practice-based method of recontextualisation, a material renegotiation of subjectivity, in a time of planetary crisis. This practice-based research has activated the collective within the subjective, manifesting qualities that can be applied to all genders, all species, all matter, in a way that initiates a metaphorical dissolution of hierarchical power. Thus, working through the virtual properties of artistic practice, new critical ground that agitates the concept of the individual has become manifest. The term ‘symjectivity’ establishes a feminist critique of subjectivity, in response to the plurality of human and more-than-human intra-actions encountered through the practice-based methods.