ELENA AFIRMATIVA
Diagramming by Feel
This project, initiated in 2025 and still in progress, presents diagrammatic practices developed within the framework of the theory-practice research titled “Diagramming the Possible.”
The present work begins from the intuition that there is a pedagogical and corporate fetishization of the diagram as an objective tool that organizes content. In my view, the diagram reduced to an organizational schema has been occupied by forces that are neither genuine thought nor pedagogy, but rather performance management. From there, my hypothesis is as follows: beyond this function there exists another, deeper one that turns the diagram into a tool for self-listening—the function of the “schema that breaks schemas.” My research enters this paradox: how the diagram, when activated from within artistic practice, can become a cognitive operator that opens a speculative territory, extending our capacity to imagine, project, and construct new relations of meaning. On the basis of these intuitions, the research is articulated around two general objectives: first, to explore the potential of the diagram as a speculative projective tool in artistic creation processes; and second, to probe its capacity to move beyond a merely operative function and become an artistic result in its own right. Thus, Diagramming by Feel shows how not everything thought can be captured by linear words, and how not everything explored finds its definitive form in an organized discourse. Throughout my research, as concepts, arguments, and analyses were being traced, other paths were also being sketched—more immediate, more fragmentary, yet also freer. Diagrams that were not designed to illustrate ideas already formulated, but to accompany the very gesture of thinking, to feel out possibilities not yet named. “Diagramming by Feel” here means embracing fragility and openness as part of the process: accepting that knowledge, when genuinely speculative, does not always know where it is headed. Through these diagrams (some more pragmatic, others more poetic, all born in the very act of researching) the aim was not only to represent hypotheses or results, but to activate movements of live thinking. Many of these tracings opened paths that could not be fully traveled within the main body of the theoretical text. Their presence here, then, does not seek to complete a discourse but to prolong it: to invite other gazes to think-with, to read-with, to continue diagramming toward what has not yet been said.












