New Enmeshments: Promenade de la Perméabilité
Performative walking installation 
Metamorfosis Festival – Exploring Queer Ecology and Degrowth
2nd Edition 4/5/6 October 2024

What is permeability? It’s the ability of a body, a terrain, to allow itself to be traversed, permeated, or cut through. Picture your skin – it seems like a solid envelope, holding your guts and organs inside. But look closer. Between the cells of your skin, there are spaces, voids – a possibility of being penetrated by what you think is outside of you. 

New Enmeshments is an interlocutive artistic practice developed by Imogen Mansfield and Solène Milcent. Working through participatory performance, walking scores, and site-responsive installations, the practice explores intimacy, porosity and mutual relation between species, bodies and minds. Like an organic material, it draws both strength and vulnerability from its capacity to take shape, unfold and nourish itself through diverse sources and encounters.

Promenade de la Perméabilité is a participatory walking experience conceived as an indeterminate map: a gently guided course of experimental encounter with place. Designed for small groups, the work unfolds through guided listening, moments of gentle touch, shelter, play and poetic instruction. Participants are oriented as a permeable and collaborative body, moving together through processes of togetherness and collective transmutation. The journey is composed of interruptions and stations that invite close attention to the polyphony of textures, voices, and sensations present in the immanent environment – as to a living language that we cannot yet fully decipher.

The project was first devised for Metamorfosis Festival at Can Masdeu, located within the Collserola Park on the outskirts of Barcelona. During the festival, we guided small groups of participants through the forest, meeting a series of stations, each proposing a distinct mode of communing with the forest and with one another. Using simple materials and minimal infrastructure, we compose an imaginative and experiential landscape of meandering detours – stepping away from the straight line ahead and into an unanticipated tract of being.

As part of: Metamorfosis Festival — Exploring Queer Ecology and Degrowth