From: Annie Sandrussi <>
To: Pat McConville <>
Subject: Re: Invitation to interview on Concept : Art podcast
1. Ontological disruption, and the ‘unthought’ grounds of thinking – and those things that remain hidden from our view, but are fundamental to it. I come at this from a combined Heideggerian and ecofeminist lens. I have a paper under review currently that tries to challenge a substance ontology with what I call a relational materialist ontology. Relational ontologies abound in feminist approaches to ethics, but the materialist vein I emphasise is what distinguishes my work and what I am predominantly committed to.
2. Phenomenology – esp. the everyday – and aesthetic approaches to phenomenology (might sometimes be called hermeneutic phenomenology). My PhD was a feminist critique from the purview of sexual difference feminism (big name is Luce Irigaray, but I am not strict about this) of Martin Heidegger’s neglect of the body. To say that I am interested in phenomenology of the everyday is to say that I am interested in mundane experiences because they are existentially relevant. In this respect, some of my thinking was influenced by the 1975 film: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It is a slow cinema film, about a single widowed mother, and there are many scenes that capture the mundane things she has to do in the day – in their mundanity. One famous scene is her peeling potatoes. The director Chantel Akerman says in an she made this film “to give all these actions that are typically devalued a life on film.” That really resonates with my approach. I am captivated by ordinary everyday practices, and how they can be pivotal to philosophical and ontological transformation. I also research in film-philosophy, and am really taken by diverse experiences of film viewership, and resistance forms of film spectatorship. Film-philosophy is a specific approach within philosophy of film that takes films to have the capacity to philosophise. I proceed in this area in the same way that I think of the mundane as being aesthetic or potentially philosophically-transformative.
3. Fleshiness – as part of the commitment to materialism. There is an Australian photographer Lisa Sorgini, she gained a lot of press for her pandemic project Behind Glass who does these portraits of mothers and their children and they were very centred on these fleshy entanglements. I would also mentioned her 2022 project Thick Like Water because she explicitly represents marginalised embodiments. She takes a care-centred approach. I like to think about how fleshy entanglements can help us challenge the way with think about what it means to be human, to challenge dominant conceptions of rationality, independence, maturity – and take seriously the entanglements we have with others. Fleshiness is not only literally two human bodies entwined as they are in Sorgini’s work, but also relates to eating (this is dealt with in my milk paper mentioned in (1) above). We think of ourselves as embedded in fleshy relations with other beings and this changes how we think about eating and our relationships to other beings. I am also contextualist and anti-principalist in this respect, and that is because domesticity is implicated in this – so a lot of philosphers think about situatedness (esp. feminist philsophers) and I like to think about that in terms of domesticity which is juxtaposed with public situatedness which can be articulated in terms of political identity, history, culture. Domesticity is about situation spatially and in orientation to Other bodies.
4. This is not about art as such, but it joins all these dots together – my interest in fleshiness, the mundane, and ontological disruption: a lot changed when I gestated and birthed my child and then subsequent children, in being a birth parent, and a mother, I had the philosophically-transformative experience that was all about fleshiness. I mention it because it is the thread really (I don’t think that’s too out of the ordinary really, having a transformative experience that is emphatically and primarily embodied – I think the mundanity of parenting and domesticity – distinct from the fleshiness that typically marks parent-infant exchanges, also is transformative, and so that is why I am interested in domesticity more than ‘situatedness.’ – I pursue that in the realm of ethics of eating (where I think about eating in the caregiving context)
5. I work on diversity in film and in institutions – here is a paper published this year. How I approach diversity is not about representation – so I would speak to this a bit because when I say I am influenced by photography, it is not about representation as such. Photography can force us to bear witness to fleshiness– images that remind us of our fleshy dependence for me reinstall into the zeitgeist what industry, capitalist logics, rationalism has insisted that we forget. That is also my interest in eating. Classical philosophy puts happiness and wisdom at the centre of human flourishing, but what if we remembered that we all need to eat?
6. My parents are migrant settlers to Australia, from Lebanon and Argentina, so I grew up surrounded by Marian iconography, which are Eastern Christian depictions of the infant Jesus held by his mother Mary. Icons are not really thought of as artworks as such, but more like visual aids for worship – prayer totems. They’re part of a tradition that is more insistent on the mysticism of religious belief, rather than the logos which is dominant in Western traditions. Mysticism is really crucial here, because mysticism is the idea that there is always something hidden, beyond logos, something that defies representation. And that is what religious icons are to me. Whereas in the West, a crucifix is the main sort of worship totem (and where Mary is depicted it is often in a portrait of what’s called ‘the Holy Family’ which includes Joseph); in Eastern cultures, most icons feature Mary holding the infant Jesus. I found those images quite powerful depictions and yet something about them was and continues to be uncanny to me. On the one hand, growing up with this strong symbolic of the feminine resonated with me, but on the other hand, looking at this representation of what is supposed to be the pinnacle of intimacy and relationality – well… that’s not really what it was to be the mother of an infant – Jesus or otherwise. I’ve always sort of felt the uncanniness of that depiction – Mary is mother, but we’re not to think of all the things that that entails – the fleshiness, milk, childbirth, feeding and cleaning up after the infant Jesus. Icons remind me of what is hidden from representation; and they are really oppositional to the kind of fleshiness I want to bring to the fore, and yet it is not completely hidden – so that play of absence and presence in that iconography, and icons themselves having their own sort of hiddenness as a part of that mysticism as I said earlier.
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