‘Walking by the ocean in Santa Cruz, I re-turn again and again to thoughts of diffraction and entanglement. The conversation is ongoing. The redwoods, the ocean, the paths taken and those which may yet have been taken hold the memory of these explorations by foot and by mind. We are being churned by the soil, the wind, the foggy mist. A multiplicity, an infinity in its specificity, condensed into here-now. Each grain of sand, each bit of soil is diffracted/entangled across spacetime.’ (1)

Re-turning is a term coined by the feminist theorist Karen Barad. Re-turning is described as the turning over and over again. As an example, Barad thinks of how earthworms make soil. The worms ingest the soil, tunnelling through and burrowing within it. They aerate the soil, and in doing so, breathe new life into it. This is an ongoing process, it never ends. (2)

Slow glass as a curatorial practice thinks of re-turning as a way of exploring the shifting boundaries of time within a space, as well as memory. To return is to go backwards, into the past. Re-turning, as a constant motion, is a way of thinking of the past as constantly present- it is never really behind us. This also links to Barad’s, and indeed quantum physics’, belief that memory is not a ‘replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual.’

To re-turn is important to both Slow Glass as a publication series, and a curatorial practice. It is a way of approaching memory a-new. To re-turn is to think of not just entangled temporalities, but our accountability to these entanglements. No longer shelved to a past time, we are still responsible for what we perceive as the past.

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