exhibition: queer things take time [WiSe 2021/22]

Among the Flowers

​Among the Flowers is a work composed by 25 tiles. Each tile is formed by 841 plastic iron beads. This takes time, is a repetitive work and is directly connected to childhood through the material. In fact, these beads are usually used by children to create patterns and images. The pixelisation that takes place during the translation process from a drawing to the tiles, enables the simplification and imperfection of forms and signs and the effect of things being out of focus.

 

Some tiles show images created during conversations with AI, where I asked to portray me and my non-existent twin. The choice of working with AI has a personal connection to the conversations I used to have with bots as a teenager, but also it is a medium that can work with the non-existing and moreover AI is about learning and repeating patterns already present in a culture (white-, male-, able- and binary-dominated in the case of the AI I used). This bias intricately to the core of AI are very interesting to play with when the topic clashes against those parameters and tries to escape these normativities. 

 

Other tiles are the result of a literary research. They present flowers and blooming elements, which are connected to an important sentence in the work: “let a hundred sexes bloom!”, a quote from the Xenofeminism Manifesto. To connect the tiles to this idea of blooming sexes, and by that fighting against the limits imposed by gender, the tiles have a quality of a blooming field. To do so, the pixel work with images, follows the rules of cross-stitching.

 

Between flowery patterns and AI images of a non-existent twin brother, the work contains many quotations. Here there are, as food for thoughts and as a source list:

 

“Let a hundred sexes bloom!”

Cuboniks, L. (n.d.). Xenofeminism: A politics for alienation: Laboria Cuboniks. A Politics for Alienation | Laboria Cuboniks. https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politics-for-alienation/

 

 

"[...] queer girls have dominantly been represented through particular formal and narrative devices that, in many instances, render the queerness of the queer girl “just a phase” to be overcome through the heteronormatively driven “coming of age” storyline underpinning many contemporary texts." 

Monaghan, W. J. (2016). Queer girls, temporality and screen media: Not 'just a phase'. Palgrave Macmillan. P. 5

 

 

"One can remember desperately feeling there was simply nowhere to grow" 

Stockton, K. (2009) The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham: Duke University Press. P. 3

 

 

"There are ways of growing that are not growing up. The “gay” child’s fascinating asynchronicities, its required self-ghosting measures, its appearance only after its death, and its frequent fallback onto metaphor (as a way to grasp itself ) indicate we need new words for growth."

Stockton, K. (2009) The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham: Duke University Press. P. 11

 

 

“The idea of gender fluidity suggests that gender is not fixed by biology, but shifts according to social, cultural and individual preference.”

Hines, S. (2018). Is gender fluid?: A Primer for the 21st Century. Thames and Hudson. P. 9.

 

 

“Historically, as well as in contemporary society,morals are key to the construction of femininity.”

Hines, S. (2018). Is gender fluid?: A Primer for the 21st Century. Thames and Hudson. P. 

 

 

“Heterosexuality is not a thing”, written from memory as “straight is not a thing”.

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner sex I N public. (2012). The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, 182–196. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203720776-17