Viscous Worlds: Swamp Sublime, Jelly Ontology and the Afterlife of Metaphysics.
Jędrzej Kacper Latecki
This presentation uses viscosity to track the dynamic of cultural change from high modernism to the present: from solid architectures and utopian projects, through postmodern fluidity and ironic play, into a hyper-/metamodern condition where acceleration itself creates density and blockage.
Instead of smooth sequences and liquid narratives, we increasingly encounter plateaux – thick, swampy visual worlds in which time and meaning seem to have curdled.
I explore this through the idea of a swamp sublime (jewellery, clothes and images that look waterlogged, overgrown, pressed into strange relics) and through a key figure: the remainder. (…)
I describe jelly ontology as a way of thinking ontology in terms of return, echo and adhesion: how meanings and metaphysical residues (authenticity, purity, essence, transcendence) stick to leftover forms and keep coming back as “zombie metaphysics”, shaping desire even when nobody fully believes in them.
In these viscous worlds, people often enter a state of conscious agreement with appearances: they know this is stylised fiction, yet adopt it earnestly to build hypothetical communities of feeling, based less on explicit belief than on shared atmospheres.
This will be a visual, theory-driven but accessible talk based on a close reading of a micro-ecosystem around Café Forgot (New York) and its Instagram presence. Combining image analysis, short ethnographic vignettes and conceptual framing to offer participants a language for recognising viscous experiential fields in brand and cultural territories, and for asking of any designed world: What is thickening here, what is sticking – and why does it matter?
Jędrzej Kacper Latecki
Kacper Latecki is a qualitative researcher and moderator.
Trained in psychology and cultural anthropology, he is drawn to the gap between what culture imposes and what experience makes
possible. His practice spans ethnographic fieldwork and cultural analysis, with applied work in brand, service and innovation research.
What interests him most is how late modernity is experienced — how individuals locate
themselves inside structures they did not choose, and come to inhabit them as if they were their own.
Approached through an aesthetic, psychoanalytic and linguistic lens, he treats consumer insight as symptom, not confession.
He moves between academic inquiry and applied research.
He is based in Warsaw.