Intimate constellations/constellations of intimacy: an exchange on navigating in collisions

How to imagine alternative forms of attachments and intimacies beside the centrifugal force of compulsory coupledom? This is one of the central questions in this creative exchange between an artist (Fleckner) and art historian (Danbolt), using wood cuts and words respectively in an examination of imaginaries of relation and belonging. With an interest in the power of esthetic figurations in shaping desire and politics, the article’s cross-medium exchange considers the importance–and difficulty–of reconfiguring established plots and institutions of intimacy. While the prints take their starting point in a critical reconfiguration of the visual tradition of mapping relationality in the form of couple-oriented family trees, the textual responses move between the genres of the essayistic, theoretical, and diaristic in an attempt to consider alternative modes of valuing and acknowledging relations. Refusing to let go of the desire for a revolution in the structures of intimacy in times where alternatives to hetero- and homonormative arrangements of desire seem increasingly sparse, the text flaunts an unabashed belief in the world-making power of the esthetic and its ability to produce utopian performatives that gives sense to ways of feeling and relating differently.