Chapter Red Ochre: Marking Time, Marking Bodies: Relations Matter

Allowing several images to work in relation to one another, this chapter offers a diffraction of real and imagined, past and present stories about a research project with a group of five-year-olds in a preschool and a public park. Inspired by Karen Barad’s moving presentation at Monkey Valley, I endeavour to allow the workings of time to trouble and complicate my writing with and against my encounters with the universe. Taking a cue from Barad’s travel-hopping scribe, I risk my position of pedagogue to encounter more unpredictable and unsettling narratives in which pasts are present in ongoing re-turnings. Plagues, war, environmental degradation, corporal punishment and unemployment are colonising violences that reach into the most intimate experiences of ‘self-hood’. Photography and drawing become tools for deep relations of response-ability to surface. Cutting and splaying the world into two-dimensional slices are ways of marking and measuring. In the cut made by this multimodal text, the public park is inseparable from the nearby prison, is entangled with the preschool as part of the mining industry and is implicated in the violence of war.