This issue of Hyphen Journal is about matters of ecology – biological, cosmological, philosophical, ethical matters, as well as a vibrant materialism in which violent separations between thought and matter, humans and ‘nature’, civilisation and its others are dissolved. The issue seeks to provide a platform on and through which encounters and interferences between radically different practices, schools of thought, positions, histories, cosmologies can play out, guided by the journal’s ethos of facilitating a sociality between research and practice. Through this, a tangled web of becomings and beings-with can emerge into view from the wreckage wrought by centuries of illusions of human, rational, colonial, capitalist mastery.
The theme of this issue of Hyphen Journal is Excess. In the pre-pandemic times when our editorial collective put together the call for submissions, our thinking was first of all centred around the question of how excess relates to creative modes of research, touching upon issues such as surplus, abundance, discovery and the ‘making productive’ of what initially might have appeared as waste. During the reviewing process, we sought to be open to many paths from which this theme can be approached, which are brought together in the six articles and two interviews published in this issue.
Issue 1 of Hyphen Journal was launched together with the Hyphen exhibition in March 2019. Both the exhibition and the journal’s title have been inspired by Erin Manning’s writing on the liminal quality of the hyphen as the connective element in practice-research, as a mark that traverses an in-between space, opens up connections, embodies relations, exceeds boundaries. While the exhibition sought to present art as research and research as art, the journal issue brought together exhibition contributors and the wider research community around Hyphen to explore writing and thinking as expanded and open-ended practices.