Friction is an arising force occurring between opposing surfaces, materials, ideologies, bodies or imaginations. It cannot be narrowed within a specific field or tradition of science or belief system but is rather a forcefield which connects the world by running through it. It traverses various aspects of our life, from the motion of tectonic plates and the hot waters in the gulf stream to the trembling world when skins touch or minds meet. Rather than framing friction around a specific concept or idea, it can be seen as a drift between different islands of our reality, forming co-relations or associations between various places, objects, affects, phenomenons and concepts. 

The Archipelago of friction is an attempt to approach friction as a fluent force which runs through an archipelago of interconnected islands of meanings. Written in an online document by two individuals, one living in Denmark, the other in Austria, the text itself constitutes fluency and inconsistency. Eight islands are what remain from online conversations about friction. Crystallised as topics, such as strangers, jet lag, Sisyphus or ruins, like a testament of their own personal experiences, memories and nomadic lives of travel, work, friendships, and emotions.

Can the following paragraphs be read as islands in an archipelagic narration? Emerging and sinking through the changing rhythm of touch and void, just like the waves in the ocean rise and vanish on their way to the shore?

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Movement is a primary and ongoing condition of existence. Arecaceae palm trees travel across oceans. They grow in tropical and subtropical coastlines and their seeds are coconuts, made to float on the ocean and sprout as they rush ashore in foreign lands.

When turtles are born they dig their way out of their sand nest to cross the beach and finally arrive at the ocean to swim. Turtles have the ability to recognise the sand of the beach they are born in to be able to go back there to hatch eggs once they are adults.

Cellular motility is key for cell life- even at a microscopic level, there are currents and spaces of movement that are extremely complex. For a wound to heal, white cells, macrophages, and fibroblasts need to travel to the wound in order to protect and restore damaged tissue.

Èdouard Glissant suggests that we understand our world better when we tremble with it, both organically and geographically; to be, or perhaps rather, to become in friction with the world. Movement brings new life and newer necessities of shelter. Shelter for communities, beliefs, and growth. Movement is a friction between the nomadic and the settled, the permanent and impermanent stages of being, or more likely, the belief in such phases in our life. But how to draw lines in a trembling world and mark our becoming in it? 

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Friction appears like a shudder where a traveller’s feet meet the pavement. Walking through new lands or neighbourhoods, one becomes a stranger. In Georg Simmel, we find that a stranger is a relational figure, living within the friction of proximity and distance (Simmel, The Stranger, 402). What is distant comes closer as one walks. And strangeness means that the one who is far, is actually near. Movement generates new imaginations and testaments of places, belongings, and identities.

In 2015, the European media coined the terms “the refugee wave” and “the refugee stream,” forming the imagery of the refugees and the displaced people as a natural and distant force. The movement of people brought something that was distant close, while social and moral grounds were reinvented. After arriving at the harbour – if at all – Europe still remained a distant place. Strange to its new people and to itself as an idea or a union. 

The gulf stream is a warm ocean current originating in the Gulf of Mexico. A natural force that moves north by the eastern coastline of the United States and Canada before continuing towards the western coastline of Europe. The Gulf Stream creates friction between the warm and cold weathers, generating storms and typhoons in its path. Whenever, or however, different components, materials, molecules, gestures and affects meet, they generate a forcefield of new activities, power dynamics, and responsibilities. The stranger is someone or something that comes alive in the friction between proximity and distance. 

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We feel our way through a world, which is itself in motion, simultaneously changing and being changed by places and spaces we encounter. What happens when a place remains the same but the idea of it changes beyond imagination?

The writer Merechera was born in Rhodesia in 1952 and died in Zimbabwe in 1987. The same geography with different names. Choreographer and dancer Faustin Linyekula notes that one day he woke up in another country. He went to bed in Zaire to wake up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Einstein notes that there is no such thing as an independently existing trajectory:“[…] it is clearly seen that there is no such thing as an independently existing trajectory, but only a trajectory relative to a particular body of reference.” (Einstein, Relativity, 14). Do Merechera and Linyekula then become a body of reference? Circling around political structures like planets revolve around the sun – and will such trajectories ever coincide?

Humans have always looked at the stars for guidance and answers. The movements and positions of planets have become a part of how we look at ourselves and our relations. Like a mirror. Planets become part of our tangible imaginary realm as soon as they are discovered and named. Pluto is a dog. Saturn a comic or scientific paper. Which bodies or trajectories are we really inhabiting? As the Sun Ra, a Saturnian himself, wisely said: “If you are not a myth whose reality are you? If you are not a reality whose myth are you?” 

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Forced dreams in a foreign home. The abyss of separation is perpetually present in the migrant. “You have a feeling that the new language is a resurrection: new skin, new sex. But the illusion bursts when you hear, upon listening to a recording, for instance, that the melody of your voice comes back to you as a peculiar sound, out of nowhere, closer to the old spluttering than to today’s code.” (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 15). A friction between the origin and current residency of place is there in your impaired speech. Kristeva insists that the realm of the foreigner is one of silence. Foreigners inhabit a ruined language. It is funny how the tongue gets used to one way of fitting or tapping the palette. The usage of the mouth makes an ineludible shape. The sounds we carry, the way we position our tongues inside our mouths, are also the result of the culture, the language that has shaped us.

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Jet lag, also known as desynchronosis. A physiological condition resulting from disruptions in a body’s circadian rhythms occurring when people travel across time zones. The disruptions can also cause emotional and mental stress, especially notable in people with depression or anxiety. When a body is forced out of its circadian rhythm, it becomes misplaced or alienated in the new time zone that it enters and it takes days for the body rhythm to settle in this new zone. Jet lag is the physiological and psychological response to the technologies and imaginaries of a “frictionless” world. Perhaps the end of geography lies in the belief that speed has conquered friction.

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“He tried to purge his tongue too, by improving his English and getting rid of any accent from the speaking of it. It was painful to listen to him, as it was painful to watch him trying to scrub the blackness out of his skin.” (Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger, 131).

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘scrub’ as the act of rubbing something hard in order to clean it. The idea of cleaning is one of the forefront concepts of racism, ethnic, social and religious violence; for the intent or purpose of cleansing is to achieve ´purity´. This has affected a vast majority of the world’s populations which are ironically labelled as “minorities”. The perpetual scrubbing of the skin, the culture, the identities – scrubbing exists within language. Some bodies have systematically been named ‘humans’ while others have not. Naming peoples or cultures is not a descriptive act, but a performative and structural act (Engin Isin, Mobile Peoples, 116).

The language of war is often talked about, but it is also the war of language that is in itself a material war. 

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Albert Camus said that one should imagine a happy Sisyphus, one who attains contentment by the continuous and arduous effort of self-realization. Sisyphus was condemned by the Gods to carry a stone to the top of a hill ad nauseam. When the stone is close to reaching the top of the hill it immediately falls down and has to be carried up once again. Sisyphus’ back, his body, is shaped by the weight of the stone. Can we imagine that the stone was likewise shaped by Sisyphus’ back? The harshness or flexibility of materiality allows us to reflect upon our understanding of time. What does it mean for the body of Sisyphus to be in perpetual friction with a stone? Which temporalities would be played in both bodies – human and stone – in eternity? It is easier to imagine the human body, its plasticity, its interiority, as we have been conditioned to understand the world from a human perspective. “It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us.” (Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise II, 16, 5).

The video piece Breeding ground by the performer and dancer Linh Tuyet Le explores the simple act of a body engaging with a set of bricks. In an attempt to be covered by stones, Lihn repeatedly placed stone after stone on her body. Both the body and the stone seem to engage in an impossible dialogue – a fleeting one.

Issa Samb notes that “[…] every time an individual moves an object from one place to another, he takes part in changing the world, the order of things. On whatever level, wherever he is.” 

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A ruin is the friction between life and decay. It becomes as it fades away. Jacques Derrida asks, how to love anything other than the possibility of ruins? Continuing that question, one might wonder, if the ruins in our lives also bring with them possibilities of love? A possibility of love as an ongoing attempt to reach, recapture and mark the vibrance and motion from what is lost in life and thus make it reappear or take new forms. 

The work of conceptual and performance artist Amol K. Patil explores the processes of loss through a re-engagement with his childhood and family. In his piece Asylum for dead objects he enacts, through various gestures, the story of an inmate from a mental asylum, sketched out from a play written by his father. The work implies a negotiation with the past, where something which is lost is brought into new motion. Incorporating or giving asylum to lost gestures and the processing of loss, but also as a way to draw new lines of love from the past into the present.