Arte factu

Frissure: A Theory of the Hybrid

J. Mae Barizo

The New School

DOI: 10.58748/JMBFTH

Resumen:

This essay introduces frissure, a theoretical framework concerned with hybridity in contemporary cultural and artistic practices. Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies from philosophy, performance studies, literature, and visual culture and the work of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, it proposes that frissure—an affective response to encounters with art or music—emerges through the hybridization of these forms, generating manifold new expressions and orientations. Frissure is a neologism combining the sudden, transient sensation of “frisson” and “fissure,” a crack or a groove, to describe the deliberate breaking or blending of traditional forms to create new, syncretic expressions. This mode of practice–as an embodied process of knowledge formation and meaning-making exercised by transdisciplinary artists like Vicuña–offers tools for examining hybrid forms across disciplines and genres, revealing how novel aesthetic experiences manifest at the intersections of performance, art, and perception. Frissure ruptures singular interpretive structures, compelling audiences to confront the limits of traditional aesthetic experience and rethink how we critique, make sense of, and immerse ourselves in a text or performance. In the rather sparsely theorized field of hybrid poetics, this framework provides expansive new methods of interpretation that center the sensorial and the haptic to elucidate the prismatic possibilities of art and language.