Traumatic Objects: Interspecies Fabulatory practice

This essay addresses the question of what it is possible to do or say in the face of overwhelm caused by the climate crisis. When facing traumatic events connected to environmental harm, and on an ungraspable scale, it can be difficult to know how to begin to respond when for so many of us such overwhelm can result in turning away, paralysis and numbness. Here fabulation is explored as both a conceptual and material practice within contemporary fine art, that engages with interspecies relation, ecological precarity, and the limits of language. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, the text situates fabulation not as fictional departure from reality, but as a situated, collective practice of “worlding” that composes relations between human and more-than-human bodies. Through my own drawing series Traumatic Objects, fabulation is approached as an embodied, process-based mode of thinking and doing, in which repetition, mimicry, and material attention generate forms of knowledge that de-centre linguistic articulation. Central to the essay is an encounter with the gorilla Koko, whose use of American Sign Language becomes a point of entry into questions of translation, authorship, and interspecies communication. My iterative drawing practice – developed through the bodily rehearsal of Koko’s gestures – becomes a site in which fabulation operates as a durational and tactile process. Here, lines are not illustrative but generative, accumulating into surfaces that register shifts in attention, affect, and temporal experience. The work proposes drawing as a form of thinking-through-making, where meaning emerges relationally rather than representationally. The essay places this practice in dialogue with J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, examining how linguistic excess and metaphor function as attempts to follow non-human life across irreducible difference. Roger Caillois’ concept of “legendary psychasthenia” further complicates this dynamic, reframing mimicry as an attraction to space itself, where subjectivity risks dissolution into environment. These frameworks are extended through reflections on domestic grief and memory, in which language operates as a connective thread across species and temporalities. Engaging Meister Eckhart’s theology of “attraction”, the essay argues that fabulation enables forms of relation that resist possession, identity, and epistemological closure. The text concludes by situating fine art practice as a site of “planetary feeling” (Josephine Berry), where embodied attention, material process, and speculative storytelling intersect. Fabulation, in this context, becomes a critical and generative method for sustaining relationality within a fractured ecological present – one that does not resolve crisis, but remains with its complexities through ongoing acts of making.