Towards a New Materialism is a research project that focuses on the link between playing and signification. Play is fundamentally woven into our ability to know the world. How we play determines who we are. Much more than a specific cultural activity that we occasionally do in clearly defined contexts and within clear rules, to-be-playing is the fundamental ontological situation that we find ourselves in. We need to play to exist.

In this project, play is approached from the term uncertainty, a concept borrowed from quantum mechanics. Uncertainty indicates a fundamental instability of the material construction of reality. The ‘certain’ actions in which we engage every day are a reduction of a real (overlapping) multiplicity and indeterminacy, an inconsistent and uncountable plurality of forms. ‘Existing’ means 'performing' quantity, structure and unity within that indeterminate form. Playing is a form of destabilizing certainty, an ontological-epistemological attitude we can adopt towards the regimes of meaning that shape our being. Playing as a performing arts practice is an ideal laboratory to explore this process because the exponential multiplication of the gaze short-circuits the certainty within which we pretend to act. The stage actor is forced to be multiform and to stand in a truth that cannot be contained in a unit.