Tending to Surfaces: Material Empathy, Bacterial Cellulose, and the Corpus of the Convertite
Tending to Surfaces: Material Empathy, Bacterial Cellulose, and the Corpus of the Convertite

Summary/Abstract: Over the last two decades, a rethinking of how we engage with materials has worked to disrupt hylomorphic habits of thought; the assumption that matter is passive and mute, worth little without the active shaping capacity of form. This essay enters that conversation through a concept we call “surface empathy,” a “feeling with” rather than a “feeling for” that arises through sustained contact with material surfaces that carry their own logic, their own temporality, and in the case of an experiment presented here, their own capacity to exceed what is intended to contain them. Such empathy does not originate in a subject, nor is it grounded in an object. It is produced on the surface itself. We develop this concept across three material substrates brought into conversation over a five-century span: Eva Hesse’s 1969 sculpture Contingent, which for our purposes functions as a heuristic point of departure; the printed books of the penitent nuns of the Convertite in sixteenth-century Venice; and, inspired by the material labour of these nuns, the contemporary cultivation of bacterial cellulose as a fleshy printing substrate. Thinking through making rather than making through thinking, and following the material where it leads, we read these cases alongside a new materialist orientation influenced by the legacy of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, specifically their accounts of expressive matter-flows, percept, and affect. In doing so, we relocate empathy onto the surface, contributing to critical bibliography, book history, and creative practice-led research.

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