Pores are negative spaces where water can dwell. Water and pores mutually shape each other through the currents of water. Water resembles the hole when it’s contained. When flowing in and out, water erodes the seemingly-rigid surface widening the holes, or carries sediments to close the openings.
In our works of diagramming, we question if there can be a non-extractivist approach to negative space that is not a product of violence for simplicity, but rather as an acknowledgement of unintelligibility. Our inspiration here is how Anne Carson translated the poetry of Sappho, a legendary archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos.* Her works preserved on broken papyrus are almost always incomplete, and Carson “have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line.” The reproductive ecologies of eels and shrimps that we wanted to map were also just as obscure as Sappho’s poetry. We imagine a diagram that is as porous as the style of translation that Carson used. She intends the brackets to be perceived as “an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record.”
A negative space of a diagram is an empty carrier bag that indicates possibility for fabulation. We refuse to consider the void as an extractable resource that has to be instrumentalized for conveying meanings, as this appropriation would only reproduce the normative status quo. Instead, we value the phase of opacity where the sensitivity toward the stories that prefer to remain obscure and the openness for the stories that haven’t been told are simultaneously present.
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*Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Folio Society, 2019).
💧Membrane
💧Segregation by Graphic Design
💧Dough
💧Digramming like a Carrier Bag
💧Hydrofeminist Visual Language