The Direction I Rub One Matters
Ian Tee, Moses Tan, Zarina Muhammad, Zulkhairi Zulkiflee

Publisher • Grey Projects
Year • 2019
Pages • 60
Dimensions • 17.5 x 25 cm

The Direction I Rub One Matters highlights how tactility possesses its own affect; it offers intimacy, comfort, security, and melancholy, to mention a few among the wide and varied ways these affects can manifest with our tactile contacts. The intensities provoked by cloth closely held against skin brings to the fore of our consciousness our desire for and fears of mutuality, shelter, protection, and isolation, desires that form up and direct our fragile embodiments and socialities, which are confronted with alarming force of late by ideologies of permanent and total transcendence. As the poet Cyril Wong writes, ‘the breeze wiping/ its cheek against our clothes is not a passing divinity,/ but the aftermath of something that has sped us by. These aftermaths and resonances, misread often as indications of the body’s afterlife, of higher bodies, of a Body beyond the body, are our fleshliness’ insistence on taking up room among other flesh, on its occupation of our present inhabitations and time, on its persistence as a queer event not easily erased.