Cosa Bella Mortal: A Work of Friction

Project description from the EER website:

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Cosa Bella Mortal: A Work of Friction (2023) was prompted by the more-than-human themes of an EER workshop in 2021 and was later produced by EER. It is an artwork in the form of a first-person essay by artist and core EER member Elizabeth (Liz) McTernan, in which the metaphor of friction opens up a space to grieve the death of her twin sister. The essay comprises 20 sections that jump across times and places, each marked with a date and geographical coordinates to emphasise links to memory and situated experience. All examining friction from different angles, the sections themselves rub up against each other with their own narrative frictions and life-rhymes. The essay and its form explore themes of perspective-taking, shifting identities, and responsibility to memory while echoing the psycho-geographies explored in other EER projects.

 

In the writing, recurring images, phrases, and themes braid together all of the floating sections, emphasising connections among reflections and experiments: friction-driven world-building, resistance, mortality, grief, twinning, temporal dissonances, material transformations and erasures, more-than-human (re)compositions. The narratives toggle back and forth between the science of friction, studio experiments with materials, intimate recollections, multi-layered ecologies, and encounters with measurements at science laboratories. 

 

The artwork-essay was created specifically for a web medium. It was essential that the format, layout, typeface, and colour choices dovetailed with the themes of the work. The decision to design it for an online interface rather than a traditional print publication made it possible to format the artwork as an indefinitely long scroll, catching the reader in a river-like continuum of time uninterrupted by turning pages. Liz worked with Zurich-based designers Melina Wilson and Martin Stoecklin to find a digital form that would augment the themes of the text. Because the essay includes many different observations of and experiments with heaps, they chose to use a deconstructed typeface created by Theetat Thunkijjanukij called ‘Cerial’ – a derivation of the common sans-serif typeface Arial – as a way to echo the various granular materials and precariousnesses that make up the essay. The words and characters hang together as micro-heaps, on the edge of dispersal. Throughout the background of the text, excess particles thicken the atmosphere: the designers deconstructed the numbers 1–20, which demarcate each of the 20 sections, so their pieces float around the body of the text. Those floating grains are rendered as semi-transparent, so they periodically ‘heap’ onto and blend with the essay text itself, emphasising the materiality making up the artwork, right down to the constituent words. They suggest that perhaps the letters have rubbed up against each other and disintegrated, and are now floating around, ready to reconstitute into new meanings. In addition, the designers gave a painterly treatment to the background, the hues shifting across the colour spectrum to meet the moods of the different stories being told.

 

The essay opens with the first section, labelled 1 June 2021 41°39’05.4’’N 91°30’46.7’’W. The narrator recounts a brief phone call, notification of the passing of a female intimate. The person who has passed is unnamed and referred to as ‘she’, but then, with a mention of transporting ‘the body’, there is a hesitant shift to ‘it’. This unease around personhood slipping into objecthood is echoed in later sections, where questions of the interchangeability of names, nouns, and pronouns arise from sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic shifts in living and non-living material identities.

 

In the second essay section, the setting flashes back 12 years, finding the narrator on a backpacking trip in Japan, far away from the first section of the essay in both time and space. This passage introduces two heaps without naming them as such: an earthbound trail cairn and a cloud blowing over the narrator as she stands on a mountain ridge. These two heap forms – the heap on earth and the heap in space – reappear throughout the essay. In subsequent sections, also stamped with their respective locations and years, the reader is introduced to the narrator’s artistic research about friction and her preoccupation with studying surface textures. The scientific phrase ‘a work of friction’ easily slips into the more familiar phrase ‘a work of fiction’, and in that slipperiness lives the idea that friction makes up worlds, that fictions become nonfiction, which persists throughout the essay. Liz lists several dry facts about friction and its mechanical effects, and matter-of-fact hypotheticals about how one might slow her body’s wearing down and loss of heat from forces of friction. This language returns in a later section, in a much different tone, when she describes the inexorable fading away of her twin sister in hospice.

 

The next section describes an artistic experiment on Liz’s front lawn in Iowa, followed by another section describing a page from one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, featuring a diagram of blocks sliding on a tilted plane, alongside a sketch of an elderly woman’s face and a line from a Francesco Petrarch sonnet, written backwards: ‘cosa bella mortal passa, et non dura’ – ‘this beautiful mortal thing will not last, but pass away’. From there further sections unfold, recounting experiences at different metrology labs with a mix of earnestness and irony: the International Bureau of Weights and Measures outside of Paris, and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Berlin. Questions arise around what it means to lose time, whether to the death of a loved one or to theoretical advances in exacting atomic clocks. What it means to lose embodiment and personhood, whether to cremation and scattering of ashes in a stream or to physical objects rendered obsolete by technological achievements in abstraction. Motifs that appear in one section resurface in the completely different contexts of other sections: heaps, the sorites paradox, mirrors, backwards writing, the letters A and B, airplanes, shrubs, willow branches, charcoal, soil, silicon, pasta, outer space, angles of repose, fingernails, eyelashes, volcanoes. The words we attach to things bring new images, and the things we make bring new words, new worlds, new works of friction.

 

At the very bottom of the artwork-essay, there is a note that it was written while thinking along with: Kenneth Holmberg and Ali Erdemir’s article ‘Influence of tribology on global energy consumption, costs and emissions’ (2017), Ian M. Hutchings’s ‘Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of friction’ (2016), Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweet Grass (2015), Sara Ahmed’s ‘Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others’ (2004), Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), James Burton’s ‘Metafiction and General Ecology: Making Worlds with Worlds’ (2017), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), and Joe Dumit’s ‘More than human reflections and flickering agencies’ workshop (2021).