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; listen closer. Between the cells of your skin, there are spaces, voids – a possibility of being penetrated by what you think is outside of you. 

Permutated poems, string figures, taking detours – allowing ourselves to change itineraries, to at least try stepping away from the straight line ahead. ‘Faire du bricolage'. It’s about playfully making with whatever materials you have at hand. Your bricolage might look a bit crooked or twisted, and maybe it’ll fall apart – but that’s all right, because you’re creating your own imaginative world. An illustration of permeability? Your thoughts from your inside, taking shape on the outside, right in front of you.

New Enmeshments is an interlocutive project by artistic partners Solène Milcent and Imogen Mansfield, addressing notions of intimacy, porosity and inter-relativity between species, bodies and minds. This practice draws strength and vulnerability similar to an organic material, taking shape, unfolding and nourishing itself from diverse sources. Like a collaborative organism, it feeds, and feeds upon — growing in its capacity to apprehend the unknowable, and navigate towards a sense of unity within relationship to self and other beings. In a time marked by daunting ecological challenges and a growing sense of environmental bifurcation, the project seeks to explore how we can inspire capacity for lightness, movement and dreaming.

Promenade de la Perméabilité is a performative walking installation designed as an indeterminate map, drawing a course of experimental encounter with the place of Can Masdeu – a squatted social centre, residence and community garden in the Collserola Park on the outskirts of Barcelona. Through guided listening, gentle touch, shelter, play and poetry, each participatory group is oriented as a permeable and collaborative body of togetherness and transmutation – an experience acutely engaged with the polyphony of textures, voices and sensations of the immanent environment.

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