Disoriented Methodologies. To Perform Writing Across Drawing
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2025
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i2ADS – Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade
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Insúa Lintridis, L., & Zorrilla, A. M. (2025). Disoriented methodologies: To perform writing across drawing. In P. L. Almeida, M. Bismarck, M. C. Silva, & P. Alegria (Eds.), Drawing Across x Along x Between University Borders (pp. 127–140). i2ADS – Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade.
Abstract
This is a text born from a conversation that opens and unfolds a space-time for an encounter – in-between– the drawn and the written. An encounter that embraces the drawing as the meeting point that allows us to continue exploring, as we both find ourselves in a state of permanent estrangement. This text splits time into several times: a meeting of words and images,
a weaving of stroke and breath that, in the manner of a kipu, enables us to lay lines and address what we do not want to let escape. With Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2018) and Elvira Espejo Ayca (2022), we reveal the traces, marks, inscriptions of a ritual nature that help us to articulate a cosmos, to interrelate reading and writing experiences in an attempt to make them vibrate.
We have structured the text by considering the opportunities that drawing can have within a methodology that we have called ‘disoriented’ because it embraces the ineffable and the power of hesitation. Specifically, we will dwell on the performativity of words, with the help of Erika Fischer-Lichte (2004). It is a text that seeks to make experience, stroke by stroke, bringing forward statements that perform actions (drawings).
The possibility of what we have called ‘listening materialities’ from the drawing and its elements, looking for reflections in Jane Bennett’s (2010) theory as a system of exchange, as propitiatory inscriptions of our capacity of invocation by vibration. It is in the fragment, but also in the drift, where we place these lines of wandering that go from the language to the journey, from the experience that is derived to its graphic translation, now drawing, now looking for words that are actions. Saying them, we are “transforming” a state of things in the world.
Description
The three prepositions in the title – across, along, and between – describe a position or a movement relative to something else, by highlighting distinct spatial and conceptual relationships. In this book, they are attractors for exploring the various movements of drawing in relation to different fields of knowledge. They hint at possible research directions in which the dualisms between embodied and discursive knowledge, image and writing, or art and science in the university can be challenged through drawing.
Tim Ingold’s distinction between movement along and across (2007, p. 75) – to which we added the movement between – served as the theoretical backbone to map how drawing explores knowledge domains. For Ingold, these movements represent the ways we experience space as lines. In what concerns us here, they can serve as a lens not just for how we explore physical spaces but also conceptual spaces, by showing their limits, their unforeseen relationships and the changes that can be made.
Moving along refers to movement that follows the course of a line, a mode of knowing that is embodied and relational, as a mesh of interweaving trajectories that builds its own space by moving in it. “Drawing along” is not the mirror of a particular discipline or set of disciplines. Like a radicant plant, it borrows gestures, forms of visual representation, devices and theoretical frameworks along the path, from heterogeneous contexts, as a responsive approach to a phenomenon or problem.
Ingold contrasts along with across to describe movement that cuts through or jumps between lines, like crossing boundaries or switching perspectives. “Drawing across” means moving from one field of knowledge to another, transversing a barrier and positioning ourselves on the other side to allow a mutual understanding of the specific nature of the various research fields (Kemp, 2009, p. 33). A movement across is goal-oriented and reflects a tendency to see areas of knowledge as a grid or network of points within the university.
As a spatial preposition, between means being situated in the liminal space separating two fields or boundaries, as a bridge or a link in a chain. “Drawing between” acknowledges disciplinary boundaries, while recognising dynamic zones of negotiation where these boundaries blur, a form of correspondence and midstreaming in which hybrid forms of understanding can emerge.
Drawing along, across or between disciplines starts where most disciplines end.