tree not a tree: ‘tis the season of learning and refusal

The kinetic Christmas tree installation she and I created offers a place of material and affective negotiation, where familial attachments and personal resistances meet with a shared making.

Rather than a static symbol of festive tradition, the installation becomes what Jane Bennett calls a vibrant matter assemblage: pinecones, ribbons, ornaments, twine- each with its agency, each participating in a kinetic dance that exceeds fixed representation. This act of making-with functions as a feminist praxis of intergenerational co-creation, a form of what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa names care, not as sentiment, but as active, sometimes tense, sometimes joyful engagement.

With the kinetic movement of the materials, the installation resists the linear temporality of Christmas as repetition or obligation. It opens what Gloria Anzaldúa might describe as a threshold space: a borderland between attachment and ambivalence, cultural ritual and personal negotiation.

In this kinetic configuration, the materials carry symbolic meaning and exert affective force. They ripple, fracture light, and invite a sensory, more-than-human participation. The work thus becomes an aesthetic refusal of normative seasonal holiday scripts, reconstituting Christmas not as consumption, but as an ephemeral, relational, and moving constellation of matter, care, and shared agency.

T. (Page). 2024. tree not a tree: ‘tis the season of learning and refusal. [installation-text]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/5gygc-b7f18