Orion Nebula: Alicia Frankovich at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

In Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, which emphasises becoming over being, ‘prehension’ describes how subjects incorporate aspects of what they perceive into themselves. A pre-cognitive state before apprehension, prehension reveals interconnectedness, suggesting that perception and memory arise from shared metaphysical processes. Babies and toddlers absorb and integrate experiences from their environment by imprinting, by soaking in the world. The sensory-motor experiences of babies form early concepts and memories through prehension of their surroundings as they grasp the world with their bodies and minds. A baby does not yet know itself as separate, individuated. There is no boundary between self and other, no clear edge to experience. A mother is not an external figure but part of a baby’s being – breath, scent, heartbeat, milk, all folding into an emerging sense of reality. It’s a state of undifferentiated existence where the world is a continuum of warmth, nourishment and sound. A baby is not in relationship with its mother or with others; there is one field of sensation and shared embodiment. A baby’s world is whole, and their self has not yet been carved out of it. Through slow accumulation – waiting, absence, return – each of us has mapped, and continues to map, our difference and trace lines of selfhood.

Feather Star, 2025, a performance work accompanying Alicia Frankovich’s sculpture Feather Starshade, 2024–25, embodies the threshold of prehension.[1] The performance builds, undoes and reconstructs assemblies as images and questions that continually restructure and energise shared environments. These compositions don’t create a legible narrative arc toward individuation but wayfind emerging and dissolving entanglements of meaning and matter across planes of collective being and doing.

Eight performers, each with different approaches to movement and interpreting in performance, cluster across the concrete expanse of the gallery foyer. Their bodies stretch long across the floor, hands holding one another’s feet, connecting a circle. Pulling and pulled, together they contract and expand like cell walls during osmosis or celestial bodies in orbit. Children’s unmediated, philosophical thinking, spoken aloud by Frankovich and the performers, weaves a soundscape propelled by cosmic instrumentation.

The skies are telling us we have to go home. Why are we spinning around but we don’t feel like we’re spinning around?. When did you decide to make me? Thank you for making me.

With a child’s directness, these words recall Maggie Nelson’s resolutely unromantic musings on the material miracles of life. Criticising humanity’s amnesia and wasteful, tunnel-visioned acceleration through prehension and apprehension to a comprehension of others oriented by profit and accumulation, Nelson writes, ‘Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?’[2]

The horizontal, grounded constellations of bodies gradually spiral up – fingers and limbs rising, lifting particles that reshape the matter they compose. Smaller groups form. The performers’ body parts extend each other, joining and separating, co-emerging. Their spines meet, elevating one another, legs languidly floating as though underwater or in outer space, touched by soft currents. They ensemble and deform with coexisting forces – a ‘teleology without a point’.[3] Imagination rather than design forms and moves these bodies, manifesting distally in fingertips and toes that float the limbs and trunks they are attached to. I prehend waves, butterflies, palm trees, circulatory systems, recognising and misrecognising these forms as memories – my body part of the landscape we’re becoming with.[4]

Suddenly, a dozen children and adults from the audience enter, darting about the floor, which I now perceive as a slippery meniscus or fascial lining: a surface alive with the motion of material, a ground for macro and micro shifts, change and growth. As the adults lay on their backs, the children attach themselves to float from the supportive stems of their parents’ arms and legs. They bloom like flowers reaching toward the sun, root sequences connecting their conjoined structure deep into the earth. They exclaim with delight, moving and moved by rushes of affinity.

Babies do know as well. Babies do know about those things as well.

As quickly as they came, the children and adults fold back into the audience, the central whirlpool calming into the performers’ ongoing group movement. Hands conduct, palms moving, extending, uncurling, flapping and flickering – dancing seagrasses. Sinuous, slow tumbling gradually forms waves that decelerate and compress, then break, dissipate and find themselves again through touch.

The evolving soundscape composed by Igor Kłaczyński has a storytelling quality, with percussive drama that switches to slower mystical drones. These shifts don’t align with the live action, fracturing the visual and auditory arrangements into multiplicity through the evermoving constellations: a hand floats as though listening; arms ripple breath like expanding lungs; two bodies lie one upon the other, prone on the cool silky floor like the weight of stone holding billions of years.

Feather Star refers to crinoids – marine invertebrates whose juvenile, unstalked forms are called feather stars before they mature into sea lilies and attach to the sea floor. Feather Starshade, Frankovich’s sculpture in the exhibition space, merges these ancient, deep-sea creatures’ feathery arms with the design of NASA’s Starshade Technology Development –sunshades that fly tens of thousands of kilometres ahead of space telescopes, blocking out starlight to reveal the faint glow of distant suns outside the solar system.

Comprising a crinkled gold sheet (an emergency mylar blanket) strung from multiple heat-sealed strands attached to the ceiling, deep folds form the starshade’s expanding vanes, which rest in an aluminium exoskeleton. Delicate, cosmic and alert to the unseen. Several black and white stick weights, resembling magical wands, also modelled after the NASA design, hang around the starshade’s edge and hold it aloft. Through its centre grows a column of many strings of pink, peach, orange and silver feathery strands, like tinsel or brush, reaching almost to the ceiling. This composite being has a nervous system. Bright light pours into Feather Starshade’s body, creating a small, dappled pool at the sculpture’s base with shadows that recall peacock feathers or tropical fronds. An upside-down jellyfish or Tricholoma matsutake mushroom, uprooted from its nourishing source and body of mycelium. The work unites prehistoric, boneless wonders of the sea – once abundant in the Paleozoic Era and now steadily vanishing under the pressures of climate change – with the origami-like design of futuristic ambition still awaiting its first mission, casting humanity against the vast scale of deep time and space. This convergence brings a quiet mourning for what is already lost from the future, gone from kin not yet born.

Feather Star and Feather Starshade extend Frankovich’s ongoing engagement with imagining human and non-human behaviour through collective figuring and her curiosity about temporalities that exceed human comprehension. I’m reminded of other works by the artist in which I’ve performed. outside before beyond from 2017 is a video work exploring the transformation and merging of different lifeforms with green pixelated animations of microscopic imaging. And in 2016, the live work Shine Theory actively emphasised subjective difference through group action. Almost a decade later, in a world marked by the ongoing destruction of lifeforms and ecosystems, with human damage extending beyond Earth to other planets, practices that move us towards a transindividual self feel more necessary than ever.

Frankovich’s embodied approach to relational dynamics echoes writer and poet Édouard Glissant’s call for opacity [5, quoted below]. Without complete transparency or explanation, we can make space for difference through intractable presence. Glissant’s poetics of relation resonates with the prehensive processes of interconnection. We do not emerge in isolation but in the folds of contact – subjectivity is not set but always in a state of composing.

Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure without an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.

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[1] Feather Star (2025) and Feather Starshade (2024–25) were part of the exhibition The Charge That Binds, curated by Shelley McSpedden at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), commissioned by University of Queensland and ACCA.

[2] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, 2015, p 121.

[3] Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, quoted in The Argonauts, p 143.

[4] A relational concept coined by Donna J Haraway in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2003, to describe how identities, subjectivities and meanings emerge through entangled companionships, not in isolation.

[5] Édouard Glissant (trans Betsy Wing), Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1997, p 190.

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Alice Heyward is a Berlin- and Naarm-based dancer, choreographer, writer, editor, teacher and dramaturge. She has performed extensively in the works of choreographers such as Xavier Le Roy, Maria Hassabi and Luísa Saraiva while developing her choreographic practice grounded in embodied research, cultural memory, and critical methodologies attentive to power and production. Her writing spans criticism, essays and editorial work for platforms including tanzschreiber and Spike. She teaches movement and dance practice and supports artists through dramaturgy and collaboration. She is completing a Master’s degree focused on performance conservation, emphasising scores, the relationship between dramaturgy and pedagogy, and emancipation at School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Melbourne University. Her current performance project, Brigid, which reimagines the Banshee through voice and dance, will be performed in 2025 at Dancehouse, Melbourne, and La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo.