The (Un)Capture of Cappanawalla: Vital Materiality and Collaborative Artistic Emergence

Authors

• Timothy Smith University of the Arts Helsinki

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54916/rae.141657

Keywords:

vital materiality , thing-power, assemblage, nonhuman photography, artist subjectivity

Abstract

This visual essay recounts a photography excursion that unexpectedly evolved into a transformative artistic encounter on Cappanawalla mountain in rural Ireland. What started as a systematic and detached approach of photographic framing and capture, took on a dramatic shift toward an exertion of unknown forces disrupting the human role as artist-photographer. Various nonhuman actants exerted their vital materiality as thing-power forces and collaborators in the creation of images along Cappanawalla. This experience provoked a radical reframing of artistic creation as a distributive agency of authorship among the vital materiality, in which the human is just one creative actant among many.