Notes on Queer Ecologies Research Collective 02
Today is the day after the last day of the 14-day long second gathering of the Queer Ecologies Research Collective (QuERC) at Mildred’s Lane. Situated near the deepest point of the Delaware River (120 feet!?!) just outside of Narrowsburg, NY, this place has hosted hundreds of artists and writers in dozens of summer sessions its over two decades of fabulation. Returning to the Lane after last summer’s first QuERC gathering, I’m struck by a sense of familiarity with the house and its landscape and a friendly mystery around my being here.
QuERC 01 inspired me to deepen the ecological element of my practice, which you’ve probably noticed in my chapbook Morning Poems, zine Eye of Water, and even the bedsheets Idle Nature. Ecology was my most beloved subject in grade school, and growing up I had unfettered access to the liminal kind of nature we call suburbia, but I was soon estranged by the empirical roughhousing of ‘hard’ science, so my interest shifted to the built environment and urban threshold (another kind of nature).
QuERC 01 invited me back into ecological wonder. Now, I want to share with you a few notes on ideas and forms that circulated around my experience of QuERC 02.
Dirt / Soil
The dirt at Mildred’s is a cooperish brown, thick like clay, not far from terracota, and very different from the black dirt I know well. When it rains the dirt’s aroma mixes with that of grass and trees to create the smell I know as forest.
One of my fellow fellows here, Sara, studies urban soil and ruderal species that make surprising ecosystems in our cities’ haunted grounds. She shared the science of soil chromotography, a volumetric study of soil chemistry that yields painterly descriptions of dirt (see artist Scott Hunter’s for example).
Part of QuERC no. 2 was a queer ecologies cabaret (see “Cabaret” below), and every cabaret requires a ritual opening. For our opening, we created a portal made of canvas pigmented with leftover Rit green and brown dye, water from the Lane’s ill pond, goldenrod, lichen, forest detritus, and dirt. Suzy ripped open a slit to mark the cabaret’s start and inside our guests found a world of silly surprises: a living bush, a vat of sperm, a grief slit, a talking tree, and candles in unlikely places.
Clown
QuERC 02 opened with many questions, one of which was something like, what can we learn through performance? how can we use performance as a research method toward queer ecologies? Thinking back to the clown workshop that lo.bil facilitated at Studio 634 (the creative play dates Lisea Ship and I hosted in our old Christie Street home in Summer 2022), I mentioned how Clown’s capacity for serious play might hold some insights for our studies. My fellow fellow
mentioned their flirtations with Clown, which included a book of exercises that we tried out the following day.
The blanched-out melancholic extraterrestrial ‘Pierrot’ clown is my favorite, obviously. (Left to right: David Bowie, Lindsay Kemp, Paul Legrand, Lady Gaga).
One of these exercises involved two teams performing on opposite sides of a room. Team A would play big while team B would play small for 5-10 minutes, then the teams would switch and team A would play small and B big. Thinking about what other binaries like big/small we could explore, we did another round playing between human and non-human. One can imagine infinite binaries to investigate this way — dirty/clean, male/female, hetero/homo, self/other, plant/animal, good/bad, in/out, etc etc etc . . .
Binaries
Any of these binaries or dualisms don’t exsit a priori. We make them and they become. They become and make us. We continually revisited these binaries (as they revisited us) not to investigate them as facets of an unchangeable system, but in order to tease them apart. Try performing human, playing animal, acting other — you’ll start to see what I mean.
Edge
We flirt with the edge to learn what lies inside the hole. The hole of knowledge, from which mystery animates the whole. In conversation with Cy’s research on holes, QuERC 02 quickly figured out that queer ecologies (if not all philosophy, all poesis) is the study of holes and edges. My new research direction is edgy, and I’m excited to share with you some of the ripened fruits of my edge research (hopefully) soon.
Cabaret
Cabaret is: a show, a spectacle, a reversal, a lowering, queer, a poison cookie, a trojan horse, a variety pack, a slippery fish. The first modern cabaret was Montmartre’s Le chat noir, which hosted an eclectic mix of local agrarians, workers, artists, and aristocrats. Interestingly enough, Le chat noir met its fame first through the weekly gatherings of the literary group Les Hydropathes, so called for their fear of water and preference for wine. There is an uncanny connection between poetry and performance. Mx. Jarbeaux, who taught us all this cabaret lore and more, also served as maîtresse des cérémonies at QuERC’s one-night only Cabaret Our Toad (an homage to Antonin Artaud and specifically his Théâtre de la cruauté).
See below performances from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire, which also figured in our studies . . .
Deep Listening
Tyna introduced us to a sound practice attributed to musician Pauline Oliveros called Deep Listening, an aesthetic contemplative approach that intersects with ritual, pedagogy, and experimentation. Listening, we remembered, occurs in the whole body, and not just the ear.
Learning about Deep Listening for the first time, I immediately recognized this idea at work in my practice Poetics of Place, where I engage myself and others in site-specific exercises to listen, study, and get to know place as the beautifully irreconcilable other of which one is always already a part. It’s a funny feeling to find work that reminds me that no idea is new, that there are only new ways of approaching them.
Polyvocal Poetics (or, The Book Orgy)
One of my most beloved activities is group writing. The beauty of writing is that it serves as an aid to memory and reading. QuERC 02 amassed a plethora of books, but had little time for dedicated reading. So, naturally, a book orgy ensued. We populated little pieces of paper with excerpts and refractions from the piles of printed matter, and, with another trick I learned at Studio 634, we used these slips as playing cards. Our game was collaborative, not competitive, with the goal of creating a poem together — laying whatever cards served as the most graceful next lines until a complete piece emerged.
Excerpts from our exquisite corpse include, “Any utterance can serve as the umbrella under the hollow eyes of judges.”; “Which-slit / slip whip / witch slit / spit lip / which-shit! // She nibbled a little bit of it”; and “Open the lips to my grief-slit / a path to / understanding entangled shared living and dying; / human beings must grieve with, / in and of this fabric of undoing.”
Emergence, I recall, is how it’s done.
What I’m reading now. . .
AUX/ARC TRIPTYCH by Cody-Rose Clevidence
Perhaps the best poetry I’ve comes across this year, a collection that reluctantly, humbly and dutifully utters what I once thought unutterable, with a syntax and meter that makes me wonder about the edges between reader and writer, sound and text, place and page. . . This is a book I already know I’ll come back to for years.
Modern Nature by Derek Jarman
A diary of Derek’s life in the windswept coastal shale of Dungeness in England’s extreme bas-orient. I learn that Rosemary blossoms blue in January there, that days sometimes pass without news, and that we all need a project that makes us satisfied, that pleases us, and even sometimes creates a kind of happiness in that brief pause between.
“A Glossary of Queer Ecologies” in Anntanae 64 “Queering Nature”
A text collaboratively written by fellows of the first QuERC was published in Anntanae on the first day of QuERC 2. Glossary entries include: Anasyrma, Eros, Monster, Map, Rage, and more. . .
