An arrangement

“An arrangement” is an excerpt from a long-form experimental spatial writing work. Adjacent to (but questioning) autofiction, it details a series of encounters between an opaque narrator and building materials around her. Drafted in situ around Naarm/Melbourne, this work emerged through my current doctoral creative practice research. In this work, I draw on concepts such as Haraway’s (2016) sympoiesis, Braidotti’s (2014) nomadic writing and Rendell’s (2011) site-writing to open my fiction practice to its material and spatial surroundings, with a focus on ‘non-places’, spaces such as malls, hotels and lobbies, which are often considered to lack relationality (see Augé 2009). In writing “An arrangement”, I aim to create openings for ambiance (see Matteson 2022) – literary and architectural – to surface subtle relations that persist in these apparently nondescript urban spaces. Through sparse text design and gestural words such as this and here (also known as deictics; see duPlessis 2019), and drawing inspiration from concrete poetry and artist’s books, “An arrangement” invokes porous nothingnesses. Into these might appear light, shadow, vibrations, movements and other subtle presences – human and nonhuman – that inhabit and affect our spaces of reading and writing. You are encouraged to read this text in a non-place that moves you.