Things we know we will never know

In her work, Manuela Infante often perceives the 'more-than-human' as this unknowable territory, this excess existing both externally and within our very being. In the context of the first performances of Horizon a special afternoon took place. Manuela Infante invited one of her all-time heroes, the distinguished physicist, feminist thinker and philosopher Karen Barad to navigate the boundaries of knowledge, blending interviews, tales and imaginative narratives.

Maaike Bleeker moderated this conversation, and also performers Diego Noguera and Andie Dushime joined in. This conversation is part of the Series of More-Than-Human Encounters, in collaboration with VUB/Crosstalks.

• Manuela Infante Güell is a Chilean theatre-maker, dramatist, screenwriter and musician with international appeal. Known for her theatrical staging of contemporary theoretical issues, she creates work that crosses the line between music, theatre and philosophy. In 2021, Kaaitheater and KVS jointly presented the show How to turn to stone. Autumn 2023 will see the première of her latest show Horizon (a Kaaitheater co-production) at KVS. 

• Karen Barad is a philosopher, physicist, and feminist scholar. They are Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad held a tenured appointment in physics before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Particularly known for the theory of agential realism, Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Their research has been supported by many research foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

• Maaike Bleeker is a Professor of Theatre and Performance at Utrecht University. In her work she combines approaches from the arts and performance with insights from philosophy, media theory and cognitive science to study how people make sense of what they encounter, in the theatre as well as in daily life, and in scientific practice. She is director of the Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University and project leader of Acting Like a Robot: Theatre as Testbed of the Robot Revolution, and Dramaturgy for Devices, two research projects at the intersection of theatre and robotics. She has published two monographs, Visuality in the Theatre (2008) and Doing Dramaturgy. Thinking Through Practice (2003) and has (co-)edited several volumes including Performance & Phenomenology. (Routledge 2015), Transmission in Motion. The Technologizing of Dance (Routledge, 2016) and Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury 2019).

co-curated Camila Marambio | support by ACT & Creative Europe Programma of the European Union