ArteActa 2026, 15

Tender Proximities: Diffractive Photographic Performance with the Wolf 

Carl-Mikael Björk
Malmö University

The project approaches the wolf myth as configured in the Little Red Riding Hood tale, engaging with its psychoanalytic interpretations and their heteronormative assumptions. Against this backdrop, I draw on diffractive methodology and feminist new materialism (Barad, Haraway, Butler) to explore desire not as a projected, one-directional drive but as a phenomenon – emergent, relational, and accountable. The exposition is structured as a nodal weave of photographs, propositions, and curious questions. These invite a non-linear reading in which theory, performance, and photography diffract through one another. In this way, the research gesture resides not only in the photographs but also in the very architecture of the exposition. Tender Proximities contributes to an understanding of desire as a diffractive phenomenon and to the development of methodologies for performative photography as a world-making practice through which relations between myth, body, and image can be experimentally explored as forms of proximity.  

Keywords: photography, performance, diffractive methodology, queer theory, performativity

Published: July 14, 2026  Show citation

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Björk, C. (2026). Tender Proximities: Diffractive Photographic Performance with the Wolf . ArteActa9(15), 


EXPOSITION IN RESEARCH CATALOGUE

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