Writing the fascination for extreme contexts: Darwin’s reverie

ABSTRACT Fascination, as an affective, material and non-rational force, creates a particular bond between human beings, nature, and the materialization of space in an extreme context. This article, in relation to the ‘Darwin Expedition' in Patagonia, explores affect as a poetic reverie under the dreamscape influence of Gaston Bachelard. This poetic reverie, quilts together multiple voices, multiple writings and photographs, bringing to mind and to text, the unspeakable and the silenced absence– presence of fascination in an extreme context. Darwin's Reverie is performed as a composition of heterogeneous elements that stage an encounter between the human and the more-than-human, where human exceptionalism is unsettled and the anthropocentric fantasy of mastery over nature is undone. This experimenting-with-writing enriches how we think, how we feel, and how our feelings affect us and the world around us. A poetic approach allows us to consider and enact the materiality of language, while experimenting with writing differently.