Wayfaring in air: Entanglements of disobedient bodies

Disobedience, transgression and instinct are all traits of the wayfaring body. Like the art of wave-piloting in Micronesian stick charts (which are drawings of a kind), both made and read in a particular way, which relies on people’s ability to sense the motion of the waves for navigation. The navigator in this instance can be seen as a disobedient body in search of a way of knowing through drawing, by which such knowledge is a process of wayfaring through mediums, ideas and critical reflection. Navigating through the drawing process reveals known and unknown directions, which relies on observation, critical reading and bodily instinct. The process of work harnesses, at least for a moment, the most disobedient component of the body – the breath as air – that operates and draws. Between life and death, the body asserts its capacity to adapt or resist transformations. Such disobedience emanates from eighteenth-century Italian waxworks of dead bodies and their capacity to look as if alive demonstrating an eerie disobedience of a kind. The act of drawing life to the body is further enhanced by the material reversibility of the wax, a unique material of metamorphosis, that it was made with where the inside and the outside of the body become seamlessly connected, as if the inside flesh is still breathing. Here the question that presents itself is if disobedience (of the body) is a transgression of a kind, or a search for other ways of being and knowing through drawing? By being receptive to the body implicated in the process of drawing, we can tune to sensations of the imperceptible matters of air and find out about the disobedient body in troublesome entanglements. This presents a relational threshold that engages with uncertain, precarious and correlative conditions where disobedience is both an act and a wayfaring process of drawing.