In 2011, Julieanna Preston delivered a durational performance called BALE at Snowwhite Gallery in Auckland. Exploring the limits between human and non-human agency, a sensibility between things, BALE initiated a series of works where it has been her ambition to reveal the live matter in seemingly inert materials through the use of feminist strategies which undo hierarchical domination/oppression/ suppression. Much of her work in recent years has located what she calls seething latent forces, not under or on the surface, but of the surface. Surface here is a spatio-temporal situated-ness emerging out of the interactions between material subjects. Julieanna has extended the relational aspect of BALE to performance writing in a book chapter “utter matter condensed” in Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts edited by Peg Rawes, Timothy Mathews and Stephen Loo, IB Tauris, 2016.

As the I.B. Tauris website describes, "As the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault defined the concept, 'biopolitics' is the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population. Poetic Biopolitics is a positive attempt to explain and show how the often destructive effects and affects of biopolitical power structures can be deconstructed not only critically but poetically in the arts and humanities: in architecture, art, literature, modern languages, performance studies, film and philosophy. It is an interdisciplinary response to the contemporary global crisis of community conflict, social and environmental wellbeing. Structured in three parts - biopolitical bodies and imaginaries, voices and bodies, and social and environmental turbulence - this innovative book meshes performative and visual poetics with critical theory and feminist philosophy. It examines the complex expressions of our physical and psychic lives through artefact, body, dialogue, image, installation and word."