ISSUE 64 — SUMMER 2024

In the introduction of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erikson argue that “white men came to assert their increasingly heterosexual identities in the wilderness explicitly against the urban specter of the queer, the immigrant, and the communist, a legion of feminized men who were clearly not of the same manly caliber as the likes of Theodore Roosevelt”

This issue of Antennae, and the one that preceded it in March (find in Back Issues section), is part of a diptych dedicated to new advances in Queer Ecology and the arts. As a field of studies, Queer Ecology emerged in the mid 1990s from the intersection of Eco-criticism with Queer Theory. Highly concerned with the relentless erasure of queer behaviours operated by science and natural history, Queer Ecologies focuses on the relentless deconstruction of the conception of “nature” as formulated in Western culture; it challenges the dualistic ways of thinking that separates nature from culture, and human from other earthlings. Ultimately, it critiques heteronormative constructs of nature and sexuality as not only socially divisive but also ecologically damaging.

Queer Ecology embraces the biological fluidity and uncontainable exuberance of more-than-human worlds to craft new thinking modalities, plateaus, and blueprints through which to reconfigure inherited normative notions and map new epistemological territories. The all-important concept of 'queer nature' acknowledges that many more-than-human earthlings engage in queer behaviours, challenging the heteronormative assumptions that have been handed down to us by science and natural history. Queer ecology thus critiques the anthropocentrism that underpins environmental discourse and advocates for a more inclusive and diverse understanding of ecologies for our time. In brief, Queer Ecology, instigates a radical reconsideration of every truth that patriarchy has passed down to us. Not only it is one of the most vibrant and creative contemporary fields of inquiry, but it doubtlessly is also is one of the most urgent.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief

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in this issue

Elena Antoniolli

Roseline Armange

Sharon Arnold

O.Pen Be

Ellen Bergan

Sage Brice

Helen J. (Hj) Bullard

Maurício Chades

Lauren Levato Coyne

Krista-Leigh Davis

Essentials Creative

Pan Jianfeng

Salvador Jiménez- Flores

Alexander Kelu

Tove Kjellmark

Nick Koenig

Estraven Lupino-Smith

Daniele J Minns

Elsa Muñoz

Ekaterina Nikitina

Karolina Pawlik

Ashton S. Phillips

The Queer Ecologies Research Collective

Thiago Ranniery

Jatun Risba

Catriona Sandilands

Nikita Sazonov

Uýra Sodoma

Nathalia Terra

Adamo da Veiga

Ash Eliza Williams

Tori Wrånes

Subverting

the cisgaze

text and images: Ashton S. Phillips

Thinking and feeling with a multisensory Womb/Tomb/
BooM of plastic bodies - insect, polystyrene, and human, this essay theorizes, critiques, and examines ways of subverting the “cishuman” gaze, including its fixation on legibility, moral and material purity, and its desire for complete and “resolved” works/bodies/objects.

p 14

A [Trans]calar Triptych

text and images: Ellen Bergan & Nick Koenig

In this piece, Ellen Bergan & Nick

Koenig work alongside a wood sample from a Pleistocene-aged underwater forest and [re]present it through three different media and methodological approaches to arts-based research: photography, lace-knitting, and printmaking. They probe at the parallel, precarious existences of the submerged Pleistocene wood- bodies and our queer & trans human-bodies.

p 32

Queer shanshui:
Pan Jianfeng’s
Bone and Flesh

in conversation: Karolina Pawlik

& Pan Jianfeng

Pan Jianfeng’s ink art practice has long ruminated on the dynamic potential of layering as a means
of engagement with boundaries.
In a conversation about his recent Bone and Flesh series, Karolina Pawlik and Pan explore historical, social, philosophical and practical implications of pursuing the edge as malleable.

p 44

No Claim
to the Blue-Green Bloom

text and images: Krista-Leigh Davis

No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom is an experimental video world replete with creatures, real and imagined, human and more-than-human, working in divergent ways to get out from under the toxic bloom that blankets them.

p 65

The great plan
for the queerification of nature

text and images: Nikita Sazonov
and Ekaterina Nikitina

By confronting “bourgeois” human sex, Soviet communists of the 1920- 30s opened their imagination to all sorts of interspecies and trans-life (re) productive conjugations.

p 75

The uninterrupted movements of queer natures

text: Anna Pernilla
images: Tori Wrånes and Tove Kjellmark

Intuition, synchronicity, and placidness describe the queer natures of Tori Wrånes, Tove Kjellmark, and Jonna Bornemark. These hybrid worlds invitate us to rethink our own actuality within a larger organism that we refer to as nature, pushing the viewer into other possible queer geographies.

p 95

Sacred Space,
or Home Is Where the Wild Herbs Grow

Alexander Kelu presents an intimate series of analog self-portraits that deals with the very core of the artist’s identity and with having to accept the world as it is while staying oneself. It’s about the joy of connecting with the land through plants, dirt, pain, and silence. It’s about being home.

text and images: Alexander Kelu

p 114

Transmettered cosmoecology

text: Nathalia Terra, Adamo da Veiga

and Thiago Ranniery

images: Uýra Sodoma

In this essay the authors engage with the photographic performances of Uýra Sodoma, a Brazilian indigenous transgender artist, in order to pursue a queer ecological fabulative thought experiment. The magical transubstantiation of worlds in Uýras’s performances are radical queer ways of queering nature performing what the artist calls a “organized revolt” in the Forest’s reclaiming of its own aberration.

p 123

What remains is queer

in conversation: Lauren Levato Coyne, Salvador Jiménez- Flores, Elsa Muñoz, Sharon Arnold and Ash Eliza Williams

The five American and Mexican- American artists and writers, queer and allied, in this roundtable share a love of biology, nature rights, the land, and our collective futures. In a dynamic discussion we consider the broad category of nature and imagine a world that prioritizes animism, chimerism, and other embodied, queer speculations and reformations.

p 141

Composting keratin: Making Queer Ground

text and images: Maurício Chades

Maurício Chades describes how
his artistic processes are directly influenced by the way he navigates his furry body. By delving into his biographical motivations, he seeks to understand the driving forces behind his recent and ongoing project, The Keratinophilic Cycle.

p 156

Queering ecologies to cultivate unity

Be-coming-Tree entangled live artists with barefoot technology
to cultivate global togetherness during pandemic. Queering notions of performance, artists across 6 continents simultaneously engaged with trees, streaming their actions via a shared Zoom screen.

text and images: Jatun Risba,

Daniele J Minns, O.Pen Be

p 165

A glossary of terms for queer ecologies

text and images: The Queer Ecologies Research Collective

This glossary introduces new terms into the emerging critical framework of queer ecologies. drawn from diverse modes

of engagement with ecology
and queer theory, considering questions such as What is a research paradigm for queer ecologies?

p 177

Permeable bodies

in conversation: Sage Brice and

Helen J. (Hj) Bullard

This correspondence between

artist–geographer Sage Brice and storyteller–social practitioner Helen J. Bullard retrospectively examines the increasingly queer turn Brice’s work has taken

since making Unruly Waters, a series of drawings and sculpture documenting and responding to performative engagements with the changing river- scape of the Bristol Avon (2013).

p 193

Metabolē

text: Catriona Sandilands

images: Estraven Lupino-Smith

Estraven Lupino-Smith is an
artist and researcher currently pursuing a PhD in Geography
at the University of British Columbia. Their work takes up
the complicated ways that hu- man and non-human histories
are intertwined and entangled, using weaving as a method to investigate the cultural, political, and ecological ways that power is at work in creating and re-creating physical and social terrains.

p 215

Rhizomatic

Rhizomatic is a collaborative art

installation between Essentials Creative collective and the scientists and staff at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The project is inspired by the rhizome as a philosophical concept developed by theorists Deleuze and Guattari. The installation weaves together cultural and scientific stories about diversity and collaboration.

text and images: Essentials Creative

p 223

Queer-ing Poetics
of Caribbean Hybridity

text and images: Roseline Armange

I use the roots of my Caribbean history and geography to investigate how brown, female, queer people and bodies of nature are heightened as radical spaces for restorative healing and acts of political and epistemic repairs.

p 234

afterlife

text and images: Elena Antoniolli

Accessibility, sustainability and Queer issues are often seen as distinct, but to Beth Williams they are one and the same. They cannot separate their queerness, disability and passion for nature from their identity, so why should these identities be separated from their practice?

242

"What if the world is made of liquid forms melting into each other? What if that’s how everything is connected? What if that’s how life turns into death and death turns into life?"

Pan Jianfeng p 47

"Taking part in Wrånes dreamlike and hybrid world of the furry sexless sea- creatures ... is instantaneous- ly to be part of a “movement in world-making” towards other imaginable queer geographies, questioning the ontology of human existence.."

Anna Pernilla p 99

"Fluctuation is queer, and indeterminability is often interpreted by some humans as a threat to existence, suspicious and un- trustworthy. It is only in a materialist, compartmentalized, commodifiable world where the transitory nature of fluidity is a world-ending event."

Sharon Arnold

p 144

"Trans writers and activists have considered, for decades if not centuries, how their organic, natural being is not only a “part of nature” but a different way of under-standing the nature of “nature” itself: as a flow rather than a static being, and as a wealth of potential for ongoing change and transformation including but not limited to gender transition."

Catriona Sandilands p 216