ISSUE 64 — SUMMER 2024
Time, stillness, hardness, remembrance—rocks are solidifications. Igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic—they are aggregations of minerals that regardless of their genesis contain infinite compressed landscapes that have formed over billions of years. Layers and strata—each embedded in the other, pushing against and resisting at once, for eternity. Some much force ingrained in perfect stillness.
Oftentimes, gaining any insights into this petrified universe entails destruction. Geology, petrology, mineralogy—we have devised different ways to crack open their mysteries and read the codes. Stony mineral essence is key to form and colors. What we can see is down to scale, the myopia of our anthropocentric gaze, and our willingness. How far, how close, and through which lenses should we look? How close is too close is only dictated by the episteme and what it allows us to see and say.
Following the previous installment (Earthly Surfacing), Antennae: Earthly Mattering continues our journey deeper into the strata of knowledge and matter that define our existence as earthlings. Among all the extremely valuable contributions to this issue, those by playwright Manuela Infante and artist Jenny Kendler perfectly bookend the content. From altering scales and leading inquiries into deep time as an embodied dimension, they both pose radical questions about our relationships with memory and meaning.
As always, I am indebted to all contributors, Antennae’s Academic board, and everyone else who has tirelessly lent their skills and time to the making of this issue.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief
in this issue
Robert Bean
Caitlin Berrigan
Makeda Best
Callum Bradley
Helen J. Bullard
Andrea Conte
Paul CaraDonna
Hannah Dickinson
Mark Dorf
Manuela Infante
Elizabeth Johnson
Joan Jonas
Jenny Kendler
Gracelynn Chung-yan Lau
Barbara Lounder
Rory O’Dea
Georgia Perkins
Ken Rinaldo
Dorion Sagan
Robert Smithson
Darya Tsymbalyuk
Cynthia Haveson Veloric
Kristoffer Whitney
What remains is queer
n 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.
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.
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Queer shanshui:
Pan Jianfeng’s
Bone and Flesh
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.suspicious, more aware and relaxed intimacy.
in conversation: Karolina Pawlik & Pan Jianfeng
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.
Sacred Space,
or Home Is Where the Wild Herbs Grow
text and images: Alexander Kelu
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.
Transmettered cosmoecology
text: Nathalia Terra, Adamo da Veiga, 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 pursuit a queer ecological fabulative thought experiment. The magical tran-substantiation 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.
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.
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 31
Permeable bodies
in conversation: Sage Brice and Helen J. (Hj) Bullard
This correspondence betweenartist– 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).
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 213
p 191
Rhizomatic
text and images: Essentials Creative
Rhizomatic is a collaborative art
installation between Essentials Cre- ative 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.
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 221
p 233
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?
p 240
"From unread technical manuals to forgotten best-sellers of decades past, these literary artifacts hold a printed history of urgent pleas for action, largely ignored in a world consumed by an economic death cult."
Jenny Kendler
p 15
"I started collecting soil and water from ten urban parks, wondering if paint- ing with soil could help people to let the earth touch us intimately, to remind us of our ecological belongings. But I found barely any soil."
Gracelynn Chung-yan Lau
p 126
"All real systems are exposed to gravity, which not only knows no borders, but can create order, producing stars and their new elements from which life itself might arise as geochemistry (or its extraterrestrial equivalent) becomes biochemistry."
Dorion Sagan
p 221
"I began to sense a need to counterbalance the universalism of West- ern philosophy with a more situated dimension. I began to think about the riots in Santiago that took place in 2019—stones were hurled at police, and they became weapons!"
Manuela Infante
p 237
p 16
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