~ Writing towards Requiem-to-Come

Nobonke van Tonder

1. Abstract

Posthuman philosophical movements reach into what was once unthinkable, yet now increasingly conceptualises a certain kind of lived reality. Within this terrain, the living human body could shift outwards to the margins of human-centred significance. The de-centred human is progressively less in control of planetary, political, economic, technological and ecological conditions and emerges through discourses of embodiment that foreground materialities of differential connectivity and entanglement. Marks-on-bodies (Michele Foucault¹, Félix Deleuze and Félix Guattari², Judith Butler³) presumed as a condition of the imperialist, is now considered to be the mark of neo-colonial epoch⁴, evidenced as an altered ontological template from which new forms of conceptualisation could arise.

The author, as an independent performance art researcher and critical⁵ psychologist embedded in the unfolding vernacular of the posthuman, positions this writing which translates posthuman concepts through embodied performance praxis. Operating offgrid and off-institutional, para-academic and rhizomatic, the research engages writing and arts-based practices, including Crepuscular Genre⁶ considered as an early morning modality of attuned listening and witnessing – and performances. This autoethnographic praxis foregrounds non-linear, transgressive, immersive and emergent methodologies as necessary conditions for accessing futures of generative, relational existence.

Alongside movement practices, artistic investigations extend into process-based engagements with earth-bound substances. One of these investigations undertaken by this author, enacts as divinatory movement on canvas with an agricultural medium. These practices generate visual and sensory registers that both exceed and remain grounded in the human body, contributing to a somatic mapping of posthuman states. Reflexivity is sustained throughout as both method and ethic, ensuring that creative outputs function as sites of inquiry rather than conclusive representation alone.

Based on envisioned performance, Requiem-to-Come, drawing critically on the quantum-informed feminist philosophy of Karen Barad in Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (2007), this research interrogates marks-on-body within cultural and ecological entanglements. It proposes a reconfiguration of subjectivity as intra-active and fluid, where boundaries between knower and known dissolve for the performer and possibly for the spectators. While engaging somatic vulnerability and epistemic uncertainty, the research maintains ethical attentiveness and offers a rigorous, practice-led contribution to understanding knowledge as embodied, ecological, relational and emergent.

Key Words: Genre, posthuman, somatic, divination, marks-on-bodies, Requiem-to-Come, affirmativity, ethics, diffraction, performativity, autoethnography, affect, Africanity, ontology

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Body at the Edge: Marking, Mapping and Performativity in Posthuman Ecologies. Writing towards Requiem-to-Come.

2. Autoethnography

From the very beginning, music, more particularly song, filled our lives with joyful noise. But on our journeys my father was quietly besieged by my enthusiastic "piano" performances along the top ridge of our old 1960 car seat, its upholstery sewn into neat strips that became my imaginary notes. With the boundless energy of a child, I would lunge from one side of the car interior to the other, play-singing my makeshift keyboard with gusto. Those lively backseat concerts must have been something to behold, because when I turned seven, my father kindly bought me a real piano. Although my parents wisely arranged formal piano training from an early age – no doubt hoping to balance their investment with proper skill – and despite completing my studies matriculating with Music as one of my six school completion subjects and holding past qualifications, I was never drawn to playing classical music or any recognisable tunes.

What others hear as beautiful harmony, attunement, and satisfying resolution has always stirred a quiet dissonance in me. Those clear, what often felt "pretentious" and comforting endings – the effortless "A ha!" moments of finality and pleasing agreement – performed like an unacceptable compromise, even a subtle betrayal I need to guard against. For me, life does not arrive at such straightforward resolutions. At best, in my life time, these have to die.

Back to my childhood. I actually received dance training for longer than piano training. Those classes began at age 4, when my mother, this time, was besieged by my incessant desire to dance and out of desperation she found a local teacher.

Over decades, the piano became an integral part of my dance performances. It accompanied my voice, movement, and an uncharacteristic form of embodied narrative that carried a distinct style – one that has never settled comfortably into any genre.

In fact, the word Genre itself emerged as this performance signature in describing these performance works. Because my performances do not fit within any established genre of dance or performance, Genre became a performance and practice modality – a signature of autoethnography – that utilises any object, instrument or sound to meet the performer best. These would capture the perplexity and uncanny mystification they evoke in myself and in audiences. What currently forms the basis of my performance is maintaining contact with the piano not only as a musical instrument but a form of kin⁷, the chosen, ethical, interspecies relationships of care and co-existence, not limited to blood or lineage, as described by environmental philosopher Donna J Haraway (2015) in the execution of the performance.

I believe and have a living interest and belief that everybody performs Genre all the time. Perform, through form, we give form to ourselves in space and time. Why do we look at a child, an elder, a gardener, a beggar, a politician, an evangelist before us with exasperation or wonderment at the manner in which they give form to themselves? What makes us believe that we are not in perpetual performance mode all the time? When do we witness an act as a performance? And why only then? This kind of question escalates increasingly with the mystical phenomena of the senses, time- and space-based, associated with ageing, a Genre reality I face at age 71. Since 1983 and recurrently since 2006, as can be viewed in my mostly autoethnographic performance archive⁸, I have performed movement-and-voice works, often engaging the piano, with increasing intensity and intent. Although they may appear in public at times, these performances are essentially home-based events that unfold wherever my piano – the same one my father bought in 1962 – currently stands. It remains there, ever ready.

At times I strip away its wooden encasement, exposing the multiple strings of varying thickness and tone, along with the felted wooden hammers poised like a field of quiet creatures ready to leap into sound at my touch. I remember my father telling me that piano keys were once made of elephant tusks, called ivory. I have seen those old uprights and noticed how the years leave their mark – fine lines, tiny fractures, yellowing, and a dry porosity, like parched earth or the delicate maps of ancient rivers etched into bone.

I employ my voice to dismantle the familiarity of piano tones in a deconstructive manner. Where the piano offers tones, my voice arrives determinately discordant, dissonant, unmusical, jarring, and instinctively noncompliant. These misaligned sounds often provoke an immediate visceral reaction – a sudden cough, a tightening in the throat, a gasp, a grimace, or an uncanny, feral laughter that spills beyond any "civilised" boundary. I am reminded of the theatrical philosophy of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) – his Theatre of Cruelty – a century ago, a figure whose experience of the world demanded a radical performativity. For Artaud, he reflected a singular worldview in sounds of exaggerated caricature that neither mirrored nor reproduced the Futurists' fascination with the sounds of modernity. As Cat Hope and Sam Gillies observe, "For Artaud, noise operates as a metaphor and reflection of greater disorder" (Hope & Gillies, 2011, p. 32). They further draw on Frances Dyson's discussion of Artaud's sonic imaginaries:

Obliquely to Artaud's explicit aim to shock his audiences, my exploration of an ontological exposé as participant in the human-and-more-than-human existentiality of our time is differently embodied. In such moments, I abide by the notion that I feel "being moved"¹⁰, my body returns to itself: raw, untouched, and alive with what might not been before. Any strangeness, queerness may surface. Any unfamiliar emotion becomes a hospitable guest invited to meet complexity. States can exceed the body's grammar, even its frame. Within a single breath, infinity feels already present.

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3. Africanity

I live in Africa, where we exist within the unguarded presence of a living energy of divination. Here, sangomas – healers, ancestor communicators, herbal practitioners – most often practise divination through amongst other, the practice of throwing bones. This is a profound mediation, a relational knowing, an embodied affect, and a dramatic casting of material and spiritual forces into the immediacy of the instant present. In this sense, sangomas are powerful performers whose actions can shift worlds.

My performances are steeped in a similar spirito-cultural atmosphere. Africanity¹¹ holds a differently-spiritual ontology. We move fluidly across many realms – those of matter, animals, atmospheres, spirits, and ancestors. The tidy Western linearity of "past-present-future", or "here-there" dissolves at this juncture, just as the boundaries between voice and body, sound and silence, known and unknown, dissolve as divination, or performance. What might be read as a decolonial stance emerges naturally: a natural refusal of the separations between physical and metaphysical, subject and object, nature and culture, body and mind, sacred and worldly, rural and urban, knower and known. In fact, philosophically, any binary wars with itself, and therefor, refutes the concept.

Genre performances, no matter the always-African setting, carry a similar divinatory quality. Though I do not cast bones, the act of Genre itself becomes a form of divination. It seeps into the space, time and matter of the African soul to bring rest, to affirm, to render restless, to upset, to forecast, to evoke and to articulate the unsayable, the unexplainable, and the unthinkable – with no holds barred. This presumes a degree of open receptivity from myself as much as the audience, as witnesses. But since open-mindedness cannot be presumed, its alternatives as presence, or absence-of-presence, or presence-of-absence, or a quality-of-absence will reside in its multiple attendances always, already, automatically. As Genre performer I engage with this complex immanent reality in the performance spaces.

Apart from the instant belonging-to-process that artistic acts affords the 21st century human, Genre also re-turns the sentient heart to receive the soul and the raw inclusivity of abject¹² intensities that roam through every artistic encounter.

Movement, voice, production of sounds from the apparatus of the piano, tracks emotion as the most alert form of attention, and as body. Brian Massumi, a political theorist is known for his work on affect, movement, and embodiment, conceptualises affect as autonomous from emotion, operating as a non-conscious intensity not yet fully captured by language or meaning (Massumi, 2002, pp. 1–5)¹³. Affect is resonant, at best removed from psychology and rather homed in relational ontology: it creates sensation, rhythm, micro-movements, textural shifts, unusual gestures, postures, unexpected pacing, and, iteration that is not: like no known piece of music, no movement or voice production can be familiar or predetermined, or repeated. The performer, like the diviner, is moved in ways that remain largely mysterious – indeterminately – even, ideally perhaps mostly, to themselves.

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4. Posthuman Philosophy

In this essay, with an escalation in italicised terms I have now entered the field of the posthuman philosophy, the environmental humanities, the veritable ... entanglement leaving behind the formerly, humanist: "between" "human" and "nonhuman"¹⁴. Some terms are neologisms, others are old ones, reconfigured. As two or more waves "break" (into, through, over) as each other, interminably, this writing now emerges as diffracted¹⁵ being-becoming with terms italicized with re-configured marks-on-bodies¹⁶, conducting themselves with, as, the world – worlding¹⁷ – acknowledging entanglement as new materialist¹⁸ modes of comprehension. This ongoing dynamic of the new (way of thinking-being), challenges the observation, expression and embodiment of response-ability and ethical agentiality¹⁹ of the posthuman. Human discursive practices produce multiple entangled intra-active phenomena. The posthuman field is moved and co-shaped by forces that exceed their full knowledge or control. This worlding is not a human-only-based practice, but rather specifically entangled material re-configurations. "Moving", "responding", "thinking" are intra-active engagements with, of, to, through and as the world, as new epistemological emergence.

The piano as bones (or tusks) and my movement and voice are diffracting through each other, intra-actions like waves meeting, crossing, breaking up infinitely and where the existence of "two" can be observed as neither particles nor waves.²⁰

Posthuman studies have rehabilitated my thinking from binary notions of separation between "human and non-human", "cause and effect" with a critical view on the incessant centralisation of the human in all affairs, inclusive of "Nature", linear-separate notions of vital processes, and a refusal to extend our cognition to the veritable complex entanglement of matter, discourse, and notions of space, time and matter.

I increasingly believe that performance studies and psychological practice – my two professions – cannot meaningfully claim to be sites of learning, insight, or psycho-cultural transformation toward justice if they ignore the ongoing ethical realities of a world still enduring ecocide and genocide. Jacques Derrida coined the term justice-to-come²¹ as justice is never fully present, is always deferred, emergent, and not completed. The concept acknowledges the ongoing refutation of international systems to apply their policies successfully to bring justice to people-and-environments.

In this viewpoint, the world is damaged all the way down.

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5. Requiem-to-Come

So far, even as daily visitations to the piano with voice, all this writing preceded and diffracted the actual performance event-to-come. In this way, the public performance, along with this iterative performativity, is a way of understanding how reality, bodies, and meaning are actively produced through ongoing relationships between human and nonhuman elements – rather than assuming a pre-existing, fixed human subject who simply "performs" or represents the world.

For this, will emerge as what I call, Requiem-to-Come – not a mourning for the dead, but a living requiem performed for the death of easy resolutions, once familiar harmonies, sedimented thought forms, and all that refuses the raw intensities of marks-on-bodies-being as the Anthropocene²², and the affect of being-attention such as ecocide and genocide, and more²³.

Requiem-to-Come articulates the unsayable while allowing the body to move through states, edging its own meaning. If I emit incongruity here, it is because I am not aware of what wa/i/sto-come.

Each struck note – (culled) elephant tusks, ivory, (deforested) grained wood, (dense, compressed sheep wool) felt, (mined high-carbon steel and copper) bolts and wire – diffracts itself through, with, as body, voice – crooked, dissonant, uninvited. Performative oracle, with no beginnings nor ends, is too large for the body yet refuse to leave it. There is no final chord.

Each last note frays agentially²⁴ – emerging as diffraction, ever-relationally. Requiem-to-Come, for all being-becomings, has no "end", never "began".

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6. Performative Aesthetics of Soil

There is more to Requiem-to-Come.

Integral to an autoethnographic performance practice, I engage gardening as a parallel somatic and ecological praxis: seasonal food cultivation, crop rotation, harvesting for the table, worm farming, composting, and fermentation. These practices unfold as ongoing negotiations with a changing climate, where the garden becomes a site of embodied learning shaped by instability, adaptation, and interdependence. Here, knowledge does not arise through abstraction alone, but through somatic-material participation with soil, decay, growth, weather, and time.

One material emerging from this process is biochar, a self-produced soil amendment applied in my own practices of soil regeneration. Produced through the transformation of biomass into charcoal, then inoculated with microbial enhancers, its contemporary resurgence recalls ancient agricultural knowledges of stewardship and reciprocity, while simultaneously entering new conversations around ecological survival within the neo-colonial and extractive conditions of the Anthropocene or Chthulucene.²⁵

In essence, biochar is produced by burning biomass under conditions that drastically limit the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leaving behind a porous, carbonised charcoal rather than ash. Before entering the soil, this charcoal is inoculated – or, in Baradian terms, intra-acted – through saturation with nutrient-rich organic matter such as worm tea, fermented plant extracts, rock dust, humates, molasses, kelp meal, or seaweed extract. As these nutrients permeate the innumerable micro-tunnels within each fragment, the charcoal transforms into a living substrate capable of retaining water, supporting microbial life, and slowly releasing nutrients over extended periods of time. Biochar has re-entered contemporary ecological discourse through its potential for carbon sequestration, soil remediation, and climate mitigation. Said to remain active in the soil for hundreds or even thousands of years, biochar functions not only as an agricultural amendment but also, within Requiem-to-Come, as a posthuman material witness to combustion, decay, regeneration, all in the service of ecological care and justice-to-come.²⁶

Within Requiem-to-Come, the mapping and marking of biochar migrates from agricultural practice into the performative and aesthetic field. A painting stands on an easel, quietly and ominously present within the constellation of piano, performer, and image – an arrangement not of separate objects but of relational kinship. The 75 × 103 mm canvas is itself constituted through biochar as medium, carrying the altered materiality of carbonised organic matter into the space of performance.

In this sense, the work resists a division between artistic production and ecological labour; both become iterative practices of attending to damaged worlds while remaining accountable to possibilities of regeneration. There is an ethical reason why I produce and distribute biochar on soil as my eco-artistic and gardening practice. In response to the systemic destruction of soil through pesticides, herbicides, chemically induced mining practices, polluted waterways, and carbon dioxide gases released into the atmosphere, it is a minor gesture with a sense of performative ethics.

31 December 2025. A hand full of biochar became the "paint" medium on the canvas. I smeared (it) over the surface to varying thicknesses in nothing more than 15 minutes. Again, as above, with enough of the 'I' absented, the painting felt like being-painted in a calm flurry of movements and a few final touches such as lines with the tip of a paper clip.

Intuitively I flipped the painting horizontally and was pleasantly surprised at the new materiality of the painting, almost unrecognisably so. A shock to thought: Requiem-to-Come also has this appearance. I don't think I will tire of this painting. This painting, with biochar nogal²⁷, will and will not defeat time.

1 January 2026. I woke with a swollen face that grew more pronounced as the day progressed. This transmogrification filled me with wonder: how far could Genre go? A truly alchemical performativity. The biochar painting became an agential force. The body swelled in response-ability, registered intra-action, intention-less. The boundary between artist and material dissolved in real time, spacetimemattered-ly. Was I becoming some animal? A violent rupture of laughter followed. Swollen laughter. I delighted in the pressure of the swell with unstoppable laughter. It seemed to shatter the constructed unity of the self, collapsing the border between conscious restraint and the raw, pre-subjective forces of the bodymind. In its ferocity, the laughter exposed the illusion of psychological continuity, dissolving ego boundaries into pure affective excess.

This is Genre at work, de-boned divination, transmogrification: wood turned charcoal turned biochar, on found canvas, turned facial tissue, turned ongoing visible record of encounter ... kin – with everything else, and non-linear. Here, posthuman performativity is not theory. It is a burning, itching, undeniable fact that creativity is entangled as on-going continuum, by everything.

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7. Requiem-ed Agency of/as Elderhood

A requiem proposes the recognition or mourning of death, either in its aftermath, duration or probability. However, the Anthropocene, the epoch situated for human activity on planetary life for almost a century, has been experienced – by more-than-and-humans – as an escalating congealing of destruction spanning life forces from disciplines such as biology through philosophy. In a queer fashion humans stand for the problem as well as the solution. In elderhood I view the Anthropocenic phenomenon as one having taken place during my lifetime, now reaching states of havoc and eschatological dimensions from ecological to metaphysical ranks.

As humans change, ageing makes proposals – performative, intellectual, creative, spiritual, psychological, political, relational, ecological, economic, posthuman and indeed more.

Against the capitalist ideals of speed, novelty and youthful optimisation, ageing leaves marks-on-bodies through life experience, which become intensities of duration, movement changes from productivity toward attentiveness, relationality, and resonance where slowness itself becomes performative. Difference has no opposite (i.e. sameness), repetition is not recurrence but an active process of transformation producing newness and different intensity. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1994)²⁹. In my experience, this phenomenon has embodied resonance with multiple dimensions as ageing emerges with slowing down, different affectivity in relationality-with-everything, capacities to sense beyond the obvious, becoming as intensified attentivity of life forces, and 'staying with the trouble' (Haraway 2016).

In true Baradian trajectory of movement, my response-ability as elder calls me to a performativity of relational ontology, a way of being, as, worlding, embodying a Requiem-to-Come, that would alter me ontologically.

As a clan elder, posthuman philosopher and performer the embodiment of the notions in this essay reaches into the transmutative experience of my closest proximity to death entangled with a planetary death. Therefore, in, as, Requiem-to-Come, the requiem-ed act of performance also actively, critically, performatively dies-off and mourns the death of an im/possible list:

• dualism,
• the compulsive splitting of matters in poles, each binary immanently at war;
• belief in linear, causal, "obvious", "simple" solutions;
• Russian doll style clarifications;
• the normative human subject steeped in naivety;
• gendered violence fired by religion, sheer hatred of Otherness, and censure of progressive feminist intelligibility;
• racialisation, with ardent attention to same race violence;
• immature, righteous sexualisation;
• class obsession and its consumerist consumption;
• dangerous elitist plundering of complete states, shielded by collective opportunistic morals such as ubuntu;
• militarisation of communities and children;
• blind able-bodiedness;
• hubristic able-mindedness;
• species, mother tongue languages, cultures and ecologies as less or non-grievable;
• psychologically deranged "leaders" without this being voiced;
• criminal geo-political situatedness;
• genocide following peace treaties;
• ecocide following environmental policies implying stewardship;
• nanoplastic in everything/body;
• blindness to structural patriarchy;
• political tribalism under democracy;
• global Southism;
• abandoned knowledge, strategies, all matter as "after-life" rather than integral to recycling, metamorphosing spirals;
• elitist executions of death embedded in technologically driven transhumanist thought;
• the race to knowledge, information, land, goods, weapons, power, seeds and bio-engineered food;
• death abolished through techno-scientific enhancement;
• short-sightedness, blind favouring of privilege;
• playing down, neglecting, massacring of the farmer on the land;
• refusal of death as an essential part of intergenerational existence;
• bullfights, dogfights, cockfights, horse races, institutionalised gambling exploitation systems;
• defuturing of holistic and creative educational systems;
• disbanding the entangled marks-on-bodies as unintelligent, useless past effects, unimportant and troublesome phenomena that do not deserve a critical performativity of, as the condition of our world, worthy of a requiem.³⁰

Performing Requiem-to-Come acts as a detoxification – instantly, albeit momentarily – combining criticality (as ongoing list) and embodied affirmativity as ethic.

The Requiem-to-Come, as process towards public performance (and beyond), is entangled with these multiple onto-epistemologies all the way down. This performance mission stages the living of the performer herself: 71 years. Here, chronological reality, carrying its full past into a "now" without endpoint, remains always already entangled with enigmatic futures. The great imaginary digests and feeds; vibrant dying and vital living emerge with all more-than-human creatures in "diving and rising", "melting" phenomena. These are also movement-based techniques. These entanglements resonate every instant the performer plays the piano, moves through space, listens to her voice and its culturally transgressive reverberations through her body, while the audience and painting act as (dynamically silent) witnessing agents.

In Queer Death Studies (2026)³¹ authors Nina Lykke, Tara Mehrabi, and Marietta Radomska queer, decolonise, and posthumanise death with perspectives that radicalise the "life-death" binary to vibrant naming of affirmative ontologies, all enlivening to me. I believe these not being alternatives to the binary "life-death" but an upturning, unearthing of onto-ecological embodiment as ontological birthright discovering verbs rather than nouns of ontology all the way down.

When I perform there are waves of thoughts flooding through me. These are coupled with my voice, movement, gibberish, iterations that aren't, horizontally turning the painting over and over, each time with a sense of a differently configured ethic. Do ethics precede me? Am I merely tumbling into what is already there, here? I have infinite ways to respond, but not any response would do. What makes a response happen? Am I complementing a parallel performativity of matter? What is more, no matter where I am taken, I am not "uncertain" about what I am doing. Rather I feel entangled, naively realist, stumbling into something that has been there for billions of years, perhaps interfering in a way it configures with. Perhaps I do not know that I have lost an essential agential interference and now am at sea. Perhaps I am the disturbed spacetimematter going over the same ground looking at things from different angles, never a contradiction, always complementing, spacetimemattering, never convinced that my thoughts need neither limitation nor freedom for a performative ethics of embodiment.

Requiem-to-Come includes this essay, the ardent, digestive, processual, complexly entangled performativity – a domain, everywhere – weeks before a real-life performance – performer, piano, painting, kin as audience, as a porous humanity, curious, mutilated, disgraced, defiant, humbled, silenced, discordant, abject, corrupted, debilitated by promises of "liberation", incarnation of human denial, slough, lack of capacity yet agential, inept, incompetent, with no other means than to grab and destroy, indistinguishable slimy mash-work, languor-weary, illusions incarnated, what cannot be stepped out of, and what cannot be mapped, lost oral tradition, geo-politically denuded, politically apoplectic, zeitgeist deboned, apophatic, face of famine, just before the first word spoken. Feeling now sits in everything. Everything makes the world. Consciousness as everything. Every action, performative. I am indebted to ardent posthuman intellectual and artistic labour that has contributed to my learning and had formed a powerful undergirding to the processual performance of Requiem-to-Come. A special mention belongs to posthuman study groups and their scholars I have been a part of over the past five years led by Prof Viv Bozalek and Prof Karen Murris.

Nobonke van Tonder is an elder of the Mjoli clan in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. She practices as critical psychologist, writer and performance artist, and mother. Her website and archive is available at https://theimageofyourperfection.co.za/archive.

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8. References

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