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The paradox of touch: what connects us when atoms never meet?
What might familiar words reveal if we approached them differently? In A Vocabulary for the Future, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona invites leading thinkers to explore a word of their choice. Filmmakers then translate these reflections into moving images, bringing language and visual storytelling together to open new ways of imagining our shared future.
In this instalment, American theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad considers the seemingly straightforward experience of touch. Drawing in part on their 2012 essay ‘On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, Barad introduces an unsettling idea: what we experience as physical contact arises from electromagnetic forces keeping atoms apart. The sensation of closeness, it seems, depends on repulsion.
Through quantum field theory, however, Barad moves beyond the question of whether separate bodies ever truly meet. If matter is never wholly independent, but takes shape through its entanglement with other matter, touch becomes more than an encounter between already distinct things. It belongs to the very processes through which those things come to exist.
Accompanied by imagery from Barcelona-based digital artist Blanca Rego, Barad’s reflections transform an everyday sensation into a compelling exploration of matter, identity and connection. Together, words and images invite us to reconsider not only what touching means, but what it means to be separate at all.
Director: Blanca Rego
Writer: Karen Barad
Website: CCCB
