Wildness in Queer Utopic Architecture
I am a visual artist, cultural producer, and have exhibited, lectured and held residencies in Canada and abroad. I am a Joseph-Armand Bombardier PhD candidate at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, in Montreal. For the academic year of 2019-2020, I was a Concordia University Public Scholar.
My doctoral project explores how the edging of experience - the “artful” - is linked to the creative force of desire. My current project diagrams those events that speculatively-pragmatically propose alter-values, in examples that range from the quotidian to the performative, carrying the potential to produce molecular alter-socialities in the neighbourhood of minoritarian sexual expression: a fulsome experience of ‘life’ at the edges of experience. “Life,” according to Brian Massumi, “is not an in-itself, it’s an outdoing-itself. In other words, it follows a tendency to exceed already-realized potential in an actualization of new potential” (Massumi 2015, 184). What is a queer aesthetic practice? How do artfulness and queerness encounter one another? What is that predisposition to a certain aesthetic sensibility — always at risk of being reterritorialized — that marks the alter-social formation of queerness? In explorations ranging from the relationship between process philosophy, Gertrude Stein and the children’s book Goodnight Moon, to anti-oedipal gay liberationist movements of the 1970s, to the role of gesture in the production of subjectivity in performance and sex, I’m moved to think about the worlds-to-come that each houses.
I am a founding member of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective, which asks what curation as research-creation can do; a member of the Senselab/3ecologies project; and I am a principle research assistant at the Dramaturgical Ecologies project, led by P.I. Angélique Willkie, which studies the encounter between black studies and dance dramaturgy. I also teach in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality program at Concordia University.