For a long time, I was satisfied with the idea of agency. New materialist thinking helped loosen the human habit of treating the world as inert, reminding us that action is shared and distributed. But lately, agency has felt incomplete. Animacy names something quieter and more fundamental: the tendency of things to act, persist, and express themselves according to their own nature, whether I’m paying attention or not.

A rediscovered garage on a city street sent me spiralling into questions of agency and sentience. Does a building act? Can a doorway want to return? Somewhere between “mashed potato and fuck you”, I found a reminder that words shape how we meet the living world — and sometimes, how the world meets us back.