 OK, so we're going to start. The next panel is a fully online panel. So what I'm going to do is just introduce Sue Reed, who will sort of lead the panel and introduce the conversation. Susan Reed is a cultural theorist and ocean advocate interested in multi-being ontologies, ocean justice, feminist and queer environmentalisms, and critical creative approaches to theorizing and activating less violent human relationships with more than human wealth. So I'll just press play, and over to Sue. So hi, everyone. Yeah, my name is Sue Reed. I'm joining from Buttery National Park on the east coast of Australia. It's 11 PM, and I can hear the ocean. Buttery is at the edge of the traditional lands of the UN nation, lands that were never ceded and for which just compensation was never paid. There can be no environmental justice without social justice. It's really lovely to be here with you all, and lovely and such a privilege to be in conversation today with Camilla Morambio. Hi, Camilla, who's joining us quite early in the morning from the Dominican Republic. Camilla's biography is in the program for you all to read. And I've chatted with Camilla about this. But I might just say that by way of just really brief introduction, Camilla is an incredible curator. She's a writer, an independent researcher, a magic being, a beaver communicator, and a maker of time. To Louis Havini, unfortunately, couldn't make it today. And what this means is that our session is a little wider. We've got a bit more space and time to be in conversation with Camilla about her practice and specifically about the work Sandcastles, which she has co-authored with Nina Leike, who is Professor Emerita of Gender Studies at Linköping University. After this introduction, Camilla is going to share an excerpt from Sandcastles. And then perhaps tell us a little bit more about the work reflecting on that work. We will have a conversation, see how that goes. And then we're going to open to you all to join us in this conversation. You can ask questions directly to Camilla. But we really encourage you to animate the end before you go to lunch with us. So I'm going to read Camilla's abstract because I'm not too sure if this material has been circulated. And I think it might be quite useful for people who aren't familiar with Camilla's work as well. So Sandcastles is a queer fan eco-ethical proposal to softly intervene in the Anthropocene necropolitics generated by capitalist post-colonial extractivism and environmental toxification. An auto-phenomenographic and poetic philosophical twinning methodology helps the co-authors, Camilla and Nina, to tell and reflect upon the stories of how they came to inhabit Canceland and how their visits to the site of necropolitical horrors changed them in deeply embodied ways. In this presentation, Camilla will share how the two authors move through Canceland, how they move through Canceland, prompted them to contemplate cosmic noses and practice a soft, eco-sensual and caring planetary eco-ethics. This mobilized them to become advocates for peak lands and diatoms and to rethink cancer as an environmental disease and to understand the worldwide cancer epidemic as testifying to the ways in which the planet is under extreme pressure. One co-author, Camilla, came close to dying from a lymphoma but returned to life. The other co-author, Nina, took care of her beloved lesbian life partner as she was dying from liver and lung cancer. These encounters with illness, death, and mourning changed their sensibilities and sens abilities to sense and taught them lessons in trans-corporeal synthesizing or bodily empathizing and co-experiencing with other human and more than human bodies. Based on an analysis of their twinned autobiographical stories of queer companionship with cancer, peak lands, and the microalgae called diatoms, Camilla will reflect upon her queer feminine identity and epistems and develop a proposal for a planetary ecoethics of softness to counteract the harshness of Anthropocene necropolitics. So just in summary, St. Castle's proposes a new planetary ecoethics of softness through twinned autobiographical stories of experiences with cancer and poetic philosophical queer femme contemplations of those experiences and their unlikely alliances with diatoms and peak lands. So Camilla, over to you. Thank you, Sue. Hello, everyone. St. Castle's has been an eight-year journey. And today it is just me speaking. But as you just heard Sue say, this is really a twinned story. And Nina and I met in what we like to call an otherworldly place below the city of Stockholm in a nuclear reactor. And that was thanks to the Arnell who had invited us to take part in their PhD. And it was within Malin's work and the spaces for vulnerability that they opened and sometimes forced us into that Nina and I came to know that we were both inhabitants of cancer land. And from that moment on, stories that just wanted to be told and needed to be heard by one another in what we often call existentially different positions just ensued. And we have traveled the world to meet each other wherever we might be to continue to pair our stories and allow the other to be a specter, a mirror, a fractal image of our own embodied experiences, one on the end of being a cancer sick person and the other one being a compassionate companion to a cancer dead person. So I've decided that I'm going to share bits and pieces of one of the chapters of this book that's called Cancer Ecologies. And I'm actually not going to read them in the order that they appear on the chapter so that it might be fun for me as well and leave room for questions and possibly show some of the gaps in the research process, which I think are gaps that we invite. So here I go. I hope you enjoy it. 18 years before my death, in 1961, pathologist Michael Anthony Epstein and zoologist Ebon Barr began working together. Professor and student, respectively, their mysterious causes of a newly described cancer that Epstein had learned of two years earlier from a lecture entitled The Commonest Children's Cancer in Tropical Africa, a hitherto unrecognized syndrome. The cancer in question, Burkitt's lymphoma, was first described by Dr. Dennis Burkitt, who had noticed a cancer that primarily affects children in specific regions of Africa. To research that cancer, Epstein and Barr hosted a specimen from Uganda, which was sent to their lab at Middlesex Hospital in London. Upon examination of the cultured cancer cells, Epstein and Barr found virus particles that seemed to be a mutated strain of the herpes simplex virus, HSV1, which is best known for causing cold sorrows on the lips, mouth, and face. Some of you might be thinking, I know this virus. It lives in me. I was intrigued by this finding. And bohemian research led me to an unconventional source, a medical medium named Anthony Williams. I'm not too concerned about his credibility because I did not take his word for fact. However, his insistence that the spikes in the history of herpes mutations are due to toxic overloads inspired me to dig a little deeper and to continue searching for interactions between the herpes virus and toxic substances, namely lead, arsenic, certain antibiotics, and household pesticides and herpes. According to Williams, the genealogy of the herpes virus from a herpes simplex, that's HSV1, to EVB, Epstein Barr virus, which is also known as herpes virus 4, might initially have been triggered due to host cells becoming overloaded with arsenic and lead. So the high levels of environmental lead pollution in Uganda, especially toxic amounts of lead in drinking water, are well documented. The World Health Organization has written extensively about this. And ultimately, Williams' persistent theories provoked me to follow up on this tale. William writes about the explosion of an undetected EVB, again Epstein Barr virus, epidemic, around the mid-20th century when Western women who had already been infected with a herpes virus for maybe 40 to 50 years began to present symptoms of EVB infection, fatigue, vertigo, ringing in the ears, anxiety, migraines, brain fog, heart palpitations, aches, and pain, swelling, and numbness. According to him, the whole vast sea of women who began to feel and manifest these symptoms in the years after World War II were told it was in their heads. They were called loony, lazy. And some were diagnosed with the epochs infamous crazy women syndrome. This mid-20th century femedemic eventually played a role in the rise of hormone therapy. The medical system treated these odd symptoms with synthetic hormones to address the hormonal irregularities that had arisen due to dysfunctional fibroids. And to protect bone mass, lessen the discomfort of menopause and prevent older women from drying up and having to deal with painful sex, hormones started to be streamed into women's bodies, synthetic hormones. The most common form consisted of a mixture of urine from pregnant mayors and progestin. But what if crazy women syndrome was actually herpes virus epidemic, provoked when the varicella soster virus, that's human herpes virus 3, the virus that causes chicken pox, mutated to become EVB. Two toxic household cleaning practices had swept through middle and upper class homes in the so-called modern world during the beginning of the antibiotic era at the turn of the 20th century. To combat this inhospitable environment, could the herpes virus have found its preferred seats in the thyroid cells of the women who were exposed daily to pesticides and fungicides, and not only the housewives or the maids, but also in factories and elsewhere? I'll leave this section with that speculative question, one that I kept asking myself about this relation between medical practice, environmental toxicity, women's bodies, the type of work they were forced to do, and what they were exposed to depending to their class, their culture, their geographical positions. And I'll return to the year of my birth, 1979. I'm told that the night before I was born, my mother packed two sandwiches into the pocket of either side of her smock and took a secure live concert for favorite bands, Super Tramp. The next morning, my first breakfast in America was the colostrum that oozed from her nipples into my probing mouth. Packed with antibodies and proteins, the nutrient-rich milk that sustained me for more than a year also have been infused with Epstein-Barr virus. Or perhaps I was already an intrauterine host. I jump to this conclusion because I recently learned that a year before my birth, my mother was diagnosed with a thyroid hormone deficiency called Hashemotos. Some scientists think that Hashemotos may be caused by EDV, and there's a lot of scientific papers about that that I've read. That's the same non-living infectious agent that my oncologist mentioned to me in passing when I engaged him in a conversation about the possible causes of the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma inside my body. Some of you in the audience might have had this experience, but engaging a doctor and oncologist, the cancer specialist, to discuss causes of cancer is an incredibly difficult thing to do. And Epstein-Barr is not uncommon. It's found in 90% of all adults worldwide, so 90% of you are hosts to this virus. And according to the American Society, most people in the US are infected by it. At the end of their teens, the most common way to pass EDV from person to person is orally through saliva, which is why it's often called the kissing disease, also known as mononucleosis. One study that I read stated that 70% or so of incoming college freshmen don't have it, while then 90% of outgoing college seniors do. Medical science labels it a relatively complex virus. There's not yet fully understood, and that's a quotation from the UK Health Security Agency. Yet nothing is done to better understand it. It's not commonly tested for. Most people never notice that they have been infected. They don't present symptoms. And immunologists still don't know why that is. I personally came to study while writing this book that I'm reading from now. And as far as I know, I didn't get the kissing disease as a teen, but rather as I mentioned, I believe I've been infected with it from the very start. It's part of my being in for utero. So when I started this compulsory research into how I might have otherwise contracted the virus that my oncologists have briefly mentioned, it was EVB's genealogy that shed some light on my quest to speculatively understand why I developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Those of you who have experienced cancer or are companions to cancer know that that is a looming question. Why, how? Now, the story that I'm sharing at bits and pieces about the virus's evolution and my speculations regarding its overlapping effects with carcinogenic herbicides, with the carcinogenic herbicides that I was exposed to as a child, freely roaming grass lawns doused with Roundup is relevant. So it's not just enough to be infected by the virus, but the virus and its host cells and the health of those host cells is relevant because it provides a torch for illuminating the ways in which we come to know what we don't know. I'm thinking here of how my cancerous embodiment is a source of knowledge that can contest systemic ignorance about our bodies, about the earth and about the interactions between all of these chemical substances, viruses and the likes. And the words of choreographer Yvonne Rayner, feelings are facts. And if that is a case, then perhaps my journey through cancer land can serve a higher purpose through the production of knowledge as I search my feelings. So when you bring up your feelings in discussion with doctors, they always put you in the box of speculation and of needing to do more research. And so thought experiments, hypothetical scenarios were what I constantly started to create for myself so that the limited current knowledge that I had or the data that hadn't been patched together about the relationships between viruses, cancers and intoxicated environments could slowly start to match the experiences that I was having throughout my life with this body. I don't claim that these speculation in the book, I don't claim that these speculations represent the truth instead that they constitute this vital part developing an ethics of being alive or being alive again. And of expanding the notion of who and what we consider to be living and intelligent life forms. Herpes simplex has existed for millions of years. The virus with forms of it infecting species from bats to corals to primates. Humans are the only species known to be infected with two distinct herpes simplex viruses as it evolved, oral herpes and genital herpes. These viruses are called human herpes viruses respectively. Cambridge scientists attempting to trace the evolution of herpes back to prehistoric times report that it was surprisingly difficult to find ancient examples of herpes virus one in humans. Or really despite the prevalence of it today. Their effort to track it, especially those of Dr. Charlotte Holdcroft from Cambridge's Department of Genetics says, only genetic samples that are hundreds or even thousands of years old will allow us to understand how DNA viruses such as herpes and monkeypox as well as our own immune systems are adapting in response to one another. This is interesting because of course, as I interviewed immunologists and brought my case study case, often I'd get a response from them about how toxic overloads and the ways that viruses evolve aren't necessarily connected. But resynthetic data about herpes virus has shown that only from 1925 up to the present, so individuals whose lifespan is really not more than 100 years old, shows these flare-ups of mouth infections. And a lot of the causes seem to have been in the bones and the roots of their teeth. So the herpes virus had been hiding in ways in the life of the host and would only begin to transmit through oral contacts. Mutations occur slowly over millennia, said Dr. Holdcroft. We need deep time investigations to understand how DNA viruses like this evolve. The research team emphasized that the span of viruses, even one as old as 5,000 years ago that they were able to track in the Bronze Age, was potentially linked to growing population density and to the introduction of new cultural practices and not just those of the advent of sexual romantic kissing, but also to new practices of hygiene that then open the gate for the use of pesticides and herbicides. So what then of these toxic environments of this chemical modernity that we live in, how are the non-lives of viruses affected by their toxified hosts? In a personal conversation with the immunologist Pauli Matzinger in February of 2021, Pauli responded to this question by explaining to me that the drive to get better at spreading is what usually spurs viral mutation. However, the frequency of mutations could be affected by toxins in the host cell that hamper the spreading. So rather than the toxin be the one that makes the spreading happen, it's in reaction to the toxin trying to find cells that aren't intoxified in the body that the virus ends up mutating. She pointed out to me that the host environment possibly prompts the virus to circumvent the obstacles through mutation, but that there's not a lot of data on that. There's more about it with that bacteria. So this is where my speculative story on the spikes of herpes virus mutations began and it diverges from what scientists know at present. And so I spin fact and speculation into oracle fiction that allows me to weave my own experience of EVB infection, exposure to copious amounts of herbicide as a child and later this debut with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. And I'll end with a bit about that debut. The appearance of cancerous tumors in my body 10 years ago shattered my understanding of me. At first I felt abducted by a disease. Then I became a subject of the numerous medical strategies that cured me after which the actual healing began. When I was discharged with a gloomy prediction of a 50% survival rate, I began to creatively explore the ways in which I am unknown to myself through dance, artistic investigation, conservation ecology, poetic writing and later twinning my cancer stories with Nina's. I developed a sort of alien logic to reason with cancer and cancer became my talent. In the chapters that comprise this book intertwined with Nina's text, I offer more stories of cancerous embodiment as a transference of talent. I would like for you to lean into growing new unsensibilities without having to embody the horrors of cancer yourself. Let me say it another way. I want to be our test bunny, a brief aside. I recently learned that the origin of the phrase test bunny ended in 1949. And this term refers to a pregnancy test that consisted of injecting the urine of the possibly pregnant women into the body of an immature female rabbit, a bunny. If the woman was pregnant, the hormone known as human corionic gonadotrophin would be present in her urine. And it would enlarge the ovaries of the test bunny. The test was devised by two male scientists at the University of Pennsylvania. And it was considered reliable with an error rate of less than 2%, but to discover if the results were positive, the bunnies would be dissected. And all the test rabbits died. Not all deaths are equal. Thank you, Camilla. We don't actually have a lot of time, it turns out, before everyone goes to lunch. I can see everyone clapping. It's really great. So I'm just going to make some very, very fleeting comments. But I wonder if just in this, we could just squeeze a bit of time in for a bit of a Q&A session if there's people in the audience who would like to engage with Camilla about what they've just heard about the work. If you have questions ready to go. Just some random thoughts, Camilla. This notion of a heart back to the conversation that we had yesterday, actually, and this notion of a heart back to the conversation that we had yesterday, actually, and I, you talked then about the talent, the cancer is your talent and this notion of transferring and passing on this talent. And you also mentioned that you sort of deeply embodied why cancer transformed my gender, you said. So I've, that kind of just really resonated with me. That transformation was possibly also an opening to the concepts, the conceptual abundance of gender as well. I have thoughts about your comment about being alive again and wondering if being alive again actually infuses and motivates and drives and frames in nomadic practice. That notion of not necessarily seeking closures or needing to hold or have things but rather just moving on through each continual opening that comes with being alive. Hi, Camilla, thank you for the presentation. It was very interesting to hear your experience and how you're weaving the ecology within. I'm interested in how you see the time. In the beginning, Susan kindly introduced you as a time maker and within your experience that it feel like it gave you the opportunity to go deeper in your practice and thinking. And I'm wondering how the thinking of the time has been shifted since that you transformed and also adopting the cancer as your talent. Thank you. My mother said to me about a year into cancer treatment that I had learned to rest. I was 33 at the time. So that's pretty old to not have known how to rest. And rest is another form of time completely. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. It dilates, time becomes nomadic. Yeah, you wander in rest without necessarily even being in movement. And you begin to make time within yourself. There's so much information inside our bodies that is usually silenced when it's functioning, when it's in line with itself, with its operations. The notion of cancer as talent actually came to me thanks to Octavia Butler's dawn. It's in there that that is suggested. And those of you who read it know what I'm referring to. I won't go into it, but I highly suggest reading the whole Xenogenesis series. But actually this idea of being alive again is also something that I extrapolated from where through the medical interventions, but also, and even more so, through the care that I received from those that love and know me and those that didn't love and know me and those that cared for my body and my emotions and my soul in many different ways. I started to reconstitute a life that was not just my own, but with a life full of dependencies. Some dependencies that I would have loved to have skipped, but there I was dependent on so many chemical compounds and a whole medical system. I now swim through trying to pick it apart as well to see what bits of this technology that we are constantly furthering as humans to extend our lives is actually also really hindering the future lives of the other creatures that we share this planet with and the planet itself. And so time starts to get negotiated at very different scales when you are a diseased and deceased body because I was declared deceased twice and then brought back and with machines and then discovered that this body had this virus. So Sue, you mentioned about what we discussed yesterday with gender and gender as this very ample category that all of a sudden also made me feel not human at all. So what about being necessarily human as a gender bending also? I could say a lot more about that, but maybe there is another question. Yeah, sorry, this is the kind of dry-toed comment rather than question, but I really, your talk made me think so much about the work we do and why we do it and also draw connections to some of the conversations that we've started having and I know that it is an online panel so you can't be in the room unfortunately, but I really wanted to bring some of those strands and threads together. And I think just the ways that you've also so eloquently and so movingly pointed out, which I think is really, really hard to do. So thank you for that first and foremost. But going beyond that, I think this morning we heard a talk by Catherine Fine about women's bodies and allegories and metaphors and so on and the relationship between body and land and territory. And also yesterday we've been talking about the relationship between speculative fiction or speculation, lived experience and activism. And I think one of the things that your talk did so beautifully is to make us think about life and life forms and different modalities and think about viruses as life forms as well. And the fact that those life forms are equally implicated and invested in some of these longer processes of not just extraction but also synthetic chemical modernity, right? So the fact that we can't separate these kind of time scales and also there is no way to just extract some specific, like you can't extract a virus from your body in a way that you can maybe cut off something, but it lives in and mutates intergenerationally. And I think this thinking about metaphor and thinking beyond metaphor as well, the relationship between that and the way we think about land, the way we think about communities, the way we think about intergenerational trauma was so vivid in your talk that it really, well, it really moved me for one, but it also made me connect and visualize some of these intricate multi-scaler, multi-species connections in a way that I think is really, really hard to do. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. It was exciting to read this part because it's a condensed version of many years of trying to understand my immune system, our immunity, our planetary immunity, the relationship between viruses, hosts, and toxicities, and not having a scientific background and doing a lot of scientific paper reading to strike that tone where things started to make sense for me. I'm glad that now reading it out because this book has not yet been published, so I don't know if what finally made sense for me will make sense for others, so I really appreciate your comment. Mila, I might just ask you something. So in getting across that scientific literature and having this kind of relationship with cancer land, in a way, I was kind of listening to your comments about having an encouragement really to research back into deep time about sort of the evolution of these tiny, tiny agencies. To a certain degree, our bodies are indeed like a hinterland. They are like a hinter corpus in a sense. So this sort of funny parallel of intimacy with the cancers and the microbes that we share time with and come into being with. And I wondered in trying to grasp, apprehend what was actually going on in your body, reading the science literature, feeling what you were feeling, what was happening in that in-between space? I might read a tiny little thing about that. And it's called the blue rabbit, motionless. I can't feel my legs. My digestive system is not speaking to me. I must be breathing, but I'm not aware of it. All is exteriority. The medium-sized blue rabbit wearing denim overalls, prances in with a pencil tucked behind his zine, confidently strutting across the foot of the hospital bed. I notice he's followed by a harem of females, female rabbits, that is, clayboy bunnies, really, sexy beings, walking in a line as if entranced by the blue rabbit's lure. The first of the bunnies wants a custom-made marble tub. In response, the blue rabbit says, easy. Then he proceeds to fabricate it with his ass. Swinging his hips, he carves a tub from a large block of dolomite stone, shaping it with his butt crack. Chuckle. Next up, a big-breasted lady rabbit wearing a leopard dress that is too tight-fitting. She leans in over a pile of copper sheets and requests a tiny copper tub. The ochre-colored metal melts when the master craftsman dances his anus over it. I watch the way his movements arouse the females who excitedly await their own as-carbed tubs. The third bunny is now in tow, and it's a, they're a petite bunny that asks for a large wooden tub, and we all cringe at the thought of having to mold wood with his soft butt cheeks. It's a looted Christmas, I know. Splintering wood in the ass crack makes me burst out of laughter, and the whole scenario vanishes. And I realize that I'm alone. As alone as one can be in the intensive care unit. I know it's the morphine that presented me with the blue rabbit, but what else is it doing to me? Numbness, I can't feel the urge to pee, so I piss and I shit without controlling it. Every time it happens, I'm caught off guard, and I must press a green button on the side of the bed to let the nurses know that I require changing. They come quickly and kindly, they smile, and they proceed to clean my ass. They remove yet another pair of diapers soiled with who knows what from my insides because I've not eaten anything in weeks since the hamburger that is. More than one, more than once it happens that just two, as these two ass-wiping angels finish the task, I shit myself again, and I look them in the eyes while hot tears roll down my face and they know. And I say it anyhow, perdón, perdón en mí. And they smile sweetly and the whole ordeal unfolds again, and I get cold as they wash me, and they know this too. And they do their best to do it quickly, as quickly as possible. They work in unison, quietly respecting my humiliation, my despair, my pain. Will I ever walk out of here? I doubt the septicemia that followed the semitel transplant knocked me into oblivion. It was a known fact that the extra half-dossage of the chemotherapy, given in prep for the transplant, transplant would rid me of white blood cells, destroy my immune system, hollow out my bone marrow, and cease all cell reproduction, suspending the habitual making of me, all of it in hopes of exterminating the malignant cell population at the cost of complete bone marrow ablation. An autologous transplant I was told was my best bet at survival. That was after the chemicals that had delivered me from the primary tumor prized me to secondary mass, and so on and so on and so on. That's some of the feelings that are going on in those moments, yeah. Wow, thanks, Kamala. It's 12.47 your time, and it's almost midnight here. I might just ask Bania, or one of the organizers, to advise how we're going for time. Yeah, I think we can wrap up, but I think we really, I know you can't see the room, but if there's a way to show our appreciation, our thanks to both of you. Yes, is there anyone who could just... Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, that was just wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, that was just wonderful. Thank you for holding me in this space, everyone. Thank you, that's special. Thank you, Sue. Thank you, Bania, for organizing. Thank you again for being here with us. I know it's different time zones and everything, and you've also put us in a very particular kind of space, and I know we'll think and talk about it as the day moves forward, and I hope we will be able to stay in touch with both of you as well in the future in different ways. So thank you again. Excellent. Thank you, Bania. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Have a wonderful rest of the conference. Camilla. Wonderful. Thank you. And yeah, if anybody has questions that come up later, please, please ask Bania for my email. Get in touch, I'd love to hear from you. You have a website as well, is that right? I do, yeah, yeah, that's a new thing. I've got a website, Camilla Maran on the net. I think on the net, yeah.