Touch Me, See Me, Hear Me: Power and Language

Emerging research highlights the vital role of contemporary art in challenging normative social and political models. As an agile and transgressive mode of inquiry, artistic research can move beyond dominant frameworks to engage communities in rethinking complex systemic issues, including the ecological crises of the Anthropocene. Prevailing Anthropocenic power systems reinforce linear narratives of dominance, extraction, and control. In times marked by uncertainty and fear, there is an urgent need to attune to imaginative and sensory ways of sensing, seeing, touching, and connecting with the fragility of the world—capacities often sustained through Indigenous languages and relational ways of being.

Touch Me, See Me, Hear Me: Power and Language is a bilingual (Irish and English), interdisciplinary poetic artistic research project that explores the potential of practice-based inquiry to unsettle established epistemologies. Through socially engaged and aesthetic methodologies, the project stages a dialogue between material artefacts, moving image, landscape, and the intertwined languages of human and more-than-human worlds. It asks how artistic research can render perceptible the agencies embedded in matter and how minoritised language practices might reframe dominant understandings of power and communication.

The concept of “thing-power,” is central to the project. It challenges Euro-Western traditions that frame matter as inert and devoid of meaning. Drawing on animist and Indigenous philosophical perspectives, the research approaches materiality as relational and storied—capable of affect, communication, and enchantment. Through immersive, interdisciplinary installations, the work nurtures curiosity, ecological awareness, and meaningful encounters with the natural world.

By strengthening emotional, sensory, and cognitive connections between various entities, the project seeks to contribute to the protection of endangered conceptual and ecological worlds.