 Well let's start. This is an amazing day and I want to say one thing or two things before I give the floor to Dennis Mitchell. We're so honored to have you here and so honored to have Jack Halberstam who is part of I would say Giza, right Jack? You've been here teaching, you've been doing everything so and kind of discussing and provocating and all these things that so important. But thank you everyone for joining us to the ninth edition of Affirmation Square Trans-Eco-Territorial Bodiments that actually is also trans disruptions the future of change conference that is convened by Jack Halberstam. And I'll go to more detail but only I want to say something before I pass it to Dennis Mitchell. It's how important for us it is to have this connection and I think this is also what you've been thinking about this disruption events that you've been doing. I will basically say that we're honored to basically have the two of you here and sharing this event with you. Dennis Mitchell is the Executive Vice President for University Life and Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement. The session he will open, you will open it Dennis. Then I'll do an introduction of the conversation. Then we will go to you and Marquise and then Castle and then Jack and we'll have a debate with all of you. Okay Dennis please. Thank you Dean Jack. I appreciate that. This is an exciting moment for me because we first launched Queer Disruptions about seven or eight years ago and the pandemic has really messed up my being able to calculate back but this is the first one we've done since the pandemic. So I'm really thrilled to be here and to introduce this event. Partnering with GSAP. Thank you Dean Jack. I don't know where he went. There he is. Thank you Dean Jack. Really appreciate that. It is important. We have partnered with multiple different schools and sometimes schools and institutes for these events but really really a pleasure to be hosted by GSAP for this. This conference is the fourth iteration of Queer Disruptions which began I have nearly a decade ago. A testament to our long and rich tradition of scholarly engagement around themes of gender and sexuality. The Office of the Provost is proud to have sponsored the LGBTQ Plus Scholarship Initiative here at Columbia University. The first of its kind in the United States to advance the recruitment of outstanding faculty whose work focuses on diversity and sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, the experiences of LGBTQ Plus people and the challenges that they face. To date we have supported six stellar faculty in the fields of history, English and gender studies, nursing, religion, psychology and art, history and archeology. Currently the School of Social Work is still working on recruiting two additional scholars who will use intersectional frameworks to develop scholarship on health and well-being of the LGBTQ Plus people of color. This cluster hire initiative has also attracted other faculty in the field to Columbia so through our traditional hiring processes, standard searches, target of opportunity we have also hired another five that we are aware of and don't really could be more. People who are attracted to Columbia because we launched the cluster hire in this work. Over the next three days you will hear from scholars, activists and artists on groundbreaking research that disrupts conventional narratives, sharing cutting edge research and fostering a community of scholars through programming like this conference underscores our commitment to creating a vibrant and intellectual community where diverse voices are valued and celebrated. As we consider the future of change let us embark on this journey of discovery and disruption. Together let us challenge conventional assumptions, amplify marginalized voices and chart a course towards a more just and inclusive future even in these challenging times. So I thank you for joining us on this transformative journey. I am now delighted to introduce Bart John Pullman, the GSAP Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs who will introduce our esteemed panelists unless that has changed. Looks like it has changed. Thank you all for joining us. Well thank you Dennis. I will do the work of Bart Jamp today. Thank you all for joining us. For us this is great because we have been thinking of all these interactions and this is the trans disruptions, the future of the change of change conference and at the same time is affirmations which is so good. For us affirmations is the ninth session, affirmations are serious of discussions with designers, artists, researchers, planners, preservationists, activists to affirm and interrogate how to think, redesign the building environment at the intersection of climate, ecological, societal, bodily and technological crisis and multiply in forms of dissidents. So this disruption is also something that for GSAP is not something strange. We really embrace it. And also we intend to align evidence and aspirations. We want to affirm. We don't want just to complain or basically announce what is failing but in the cracks of what is failing there are so many beautiful things that are growing and that's what we want to affirm. It's actually in the intersection of carbonization, structuralism, racialization, patriarchy, anthropocentrism, coloniality and technocracy, so many things are happening. So that's what we want to affirm and that's why we're here connected. And it's great that Jack Halberstein is here, professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University and director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality. Kind of bringing here also and connecting us with this three-day conference that is bringing together activist, theorist, artists and writers to explore the past, futures and in between times of transgender lives, narratives and theories. The list of co-sponsors that you manage is huge. It's probably everywhere but it's actually, it speaks of the amazing capacity of convening that these disruptions are bringing together. And I want to also say that this is something that affirmations for us is curated by Barjan Polman and myself and Barjan is, as Denny said, the director of exhibitions and probably the creator of the Arthur Ross Gallery here. But tonight the conversation will discuss transness as a material, ecological, technological change of paradigm. I think this is very important. Somehow what we're seeing is that transness has become a different way of being, of connected, of thinking materially, technologically. And that's why also for architecture is so important. Castle, you were telling me that you teach to architects as Jack Halberstein. So basically this is important in this building. And this is important because it's allowing us to think what we mean by ecology, what we mean by body, what we mean by technology and we found the way we relate to how they connect with each other. Marcus Bay is professor of black studies and gender and sexuality studies with appointments in English and critical theory at Northwestern University. There were concerns black feminism theory, trans non-binary studies, critical theory and abolition. Your recent books include black trans feminism that I'm almost finishing now and I'm joining so much. System Failure, essays on blackness and cisgender both published with Duke University Press in 2022. And you're currently working on a multivalium collection of critical essays on jailbreaking, race and gender. Castle is an artist who makes their own body, the material and protagonists of their performances. Their art contemplates the histories of LGBTQI plus violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Castle's performance is a form of social sculpture going from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations. Castle's is part of the collection of major museums of art including the Victorian Albert Museum in London, the art gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City. Only three days ago actually we were discussing that you presented the work etched in light that gathered more than a hundred trans and non-binary artists in the grounds of the National Mall, right? Evoking the imaginary and die-ins of the names project, the AIDS Memorial Kill, the monumental AIDS Memorial Kill that started in 1987. And of course Jack Halberstam as I said, director of the Institute of Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality here, David Feinstein, professor of Humanities, professor of Gender Studies and Inclusive Columbia as I said, places journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus Places Prize in 2018 for Innovative Public Scholarship on the Relationship Between Gender, Sexuality and the Built Environment. Your publications include Wild Things, The Disorder of Decide with Duke, Trans, A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance, Viarrance, Viarrance, how do you say that? Variance? Variance. Gaga Feminism, Sex, Gender and the End of Normal, The Queer Art of Failure, which I totally love. In a queer time and place, female masculinity, skin shows, Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. And you're actually now finishing the second volume of Wildness title, The Wild Bee, John, Music, Architecture and Anarchy, right? So we're so excited that you're so much working through architecture and a great friend here at GSTAP I would say as part of your CV. So each speaker will present their work and then we'll have a conversation open to everyone here and also I must say to our planetary cohort of respondents that it's in amazing places from refugee camps in Sudan to boats in the ocean to actually people up here probably in the studios right now. So let's start. Marcus, the floor is yours. Can we hear me? Yes? Okay, cool. I definitely need this incredibly soft spoken. I have two and a half, three preparatory remarks before I begin. The first one, I just want to express just such immense gratitude and humility for being up here with such amazing, amazing thinkers and also for you all just coming out and engaging with us in all the ways that you will. So I'm just incredibly, incredibly humbled to literally exist right now in this moment. So thank you all for all of that. The second preparatory remark I have is this is very, very fresh work. I'm working on a couple of things right now. I like how I said after I finished system failure, I wouldn't be working on anything for a while. Now we're going to like three things. But in addition to the project on jailbreaking, I also decided to write something. I don't know exactly what form it will take yet, but I'm writing something on non-binary life. And that's what I'm going to be presenting literal musings on today. And then the last preparatory remark is I, I'm going to say things and I know how I sound when I say these things. I recognize that some of the things I say and have said and will continue to say sound a type of way. And I, I just want to, I want to invite grace. I request that I request that. And so now here we go. Okay, so I begin with a story as it seems as my want as of late. My partner and I are in bed around seven a.m. on a Saturday, having already been awake for an hour as we are early rises. 702 a.m. We finished the millennial practice of staring at our phones for a period of time before shifting our focus to the day. We discussed what our schedule looks like for the day. I answering emails and then playing video games and they playing video games and then answering emails. And the conversation arrives as an email I've been dreading to send to a colleague in gender and sexuality studies. Currently as director of graduate studies for GSS, I find myself on the receiving end of a handful of requests and notes from faculty, staff and students that sing the bureaucratic tune of the I and representation and inclusion and the occasional empowerment discourse. As of course, one can imagine. It's all very boilerplate forward this flyer to your students. X department is hosting a workshop for women, et cetera, et cetera. The dreaded email and question this time was from a colleague who seems to have a knack for sort of kind of being gender radical, but not really succumbing time and again to second wavy platitudes and writing their problematic edges off as being old. It was an email about how we as a program should insist on gender as a valuable category of study and that a required course offering we've been thinking about tinkering with is important because it emphasized gender and on and on. This is also a colleague who sends the longest emails as well. I blurred it out to my partner. Both of us again still in bed. I still blurred from Instagram and Reddit scrolling that I don't care about gender and they also non binary and also a gender studies professor were a bit shocked. What do you mean? They asked and I repeated myself knowing how I sounded but committing to the statement nonetheless. We went back and forth just a bit in our characteristic way of simply trying to understand no malice. And they said that if someone came up to them and was asked, does Marquis care about gender? They'd respond. Yes, absolutely. Marquis cares. Obviously. And how could one expect any other answer? Nevertheless, after taking a moment to think about whether I wanted to hedge soften the intensity of the statement, I still committed. I don't care about gender. So as a clarifying response, I did what I'm doing now and told a story. This time a hypothetical one. Okay, so I'm at home and this is how I began. So I'm at home, right? And I hear this knock at my front door. My first response is, of course, who the hell is at my door? But the immediate second response is to go to the door. There is no one there. But there is a package on the ground. It has my name on it. But I did not order this package. I'm not even curious about what's inside the package. It's not mine. I do not want or need it. So I look around for the postal worker who dropped it off and no one is in sight. I might call out and ask, did someone leave their package to which no one would respond? I close my door and go back to minding my own business. Answering emails and playing video games. But then maybe I want to go on a walk later. So I open the door again. And there it is, the package. I actually forgot it was there. So I trip over it on my way out of the door. Now I'm slightly more annoyed. So I pick it up and bring it with me during my walk. The post office isn't far from me. Now people are seeing me with this package. They're thinking, oh, Marquis has a package. They must be excited to have finally gotten it. And of course they wouldn't use their pronouns. Or they think to themselves that Marquis is the kind of person who orders packages and likes receiving those packages. But again, this package is not mine. I arrive at the post office letting them know this package was left at my door. I did not order it and it is not mine. And what do they say? Sorry, we can't help you. It has your name on it. No one else has claimed ownership of it. So it's yours. I say I do not want it and try to leave it on the desk. They say no, it's yours. Take it. Maybe you'll like it. Maybe put it on your mantle. And in fact, you don't know that it isn't yours. Look, there's your name. I say it's not mine. I'm good. And they say sorry, can't help you. So now I'm walking back home and decide I'm just going to leave the package here on the ground. And when I do so, I get back to going on my walk. But some rando comes up behind me and says here, you dropped your package. I tell them no, thank you, it isn't mine. And they insist. I take it, wait for them to leave, then drop it again. Now perhaps the cops come say I'm irresponsible, that I'm endangering others. And then maybe they duct tape it to me so I can't leave it again. Tell me that if I leave this package again, it will be a criminal offense. So now I'm walking home with this package that is not mine, that I do not want, that everyone keeps insisting is mine, and I can't even give it back. That package, if you couldn't tell by now is gender. So I share this story with my partner and things click, I think. They laugh as do I. And I suppose clarity was reached regarding my offhanded quick. And though quick it was, there is something deeply serious about it. What I'm going to try to make somewhat clear in the remaining five minutes I have is something quite narrow, something I've said on many occasions, and something quite simple. There is more than this, this gender stuff, and what the radical trans theorizing to which I adhere offers is precisely, I think, a gift of gender's disillusion. First, let me say this. I know there are many who love gender and love their gender. So many trans kinfolk have worked at a granular level to refine and hone their genders. It runs deep, or sometimes shallow, but felt sincerely and stead vastly. Indeed, there have been many occasions, I've had such similar thoughts, and have been lovingly or not so lovingly told. How dare you say that I need to give up gender, stop carrying this package. It does have my name on it. A name I chose, and that I survived long enough to discover. And I want to carry it. It brings me joy gender euphoria. Why should I a trans person who has had to leave behind so much, and who has been left behind by so many? Why should I give up this small shred of happiness to? Who are you to tell me that? I know folks feel this way. I know deeply. And perhaps the most heartfelt moment I encountered was when I was asked to my face in a venue similar as this, quote, after all black and trans and queer people have had to give up. If we give up this to our identity, what do we have left? And I share and I've shared this experience before and I will share it again once more here. To that person who asked if we give up even this, what do we have left? I answered that person's face as sincerely and and caringly as I could, that we have everything else. I do not want gender, do not care about gender, because it does not care about us and never did. And it seems to me that there's so much more outside of gender. At times the miscommunication comes when there are different understandings we have of gender. Some say that we can have little G gender without capital G gender. Or some say that there are as many genders as there are people, 8 billion ways to be a man or a woman or anywhere in between. But let me say this. Gender, at least in my estimation, is a regime in imposition. It is, in other words, carceral. Little G genders, I should like to think are deputized by and enforce the laws of capital G gender. For there to be 8 billion ways to be man, woman, or anywhere in between still leaves untouched and importantly, improper and unable to be anywhere outside of such a metric. Because gender demands delimits permits things yes, but such things are permissible only because other things are impermissible, improper. Gender happens to us indeed happens as us forcing contours never out where choosing before we even arrive onto the scene, precisely because we're made legible to the scene can show up at all only because we had to happen through gender first. Gender says do this feel this think this relate in these ways in of course violent normative hegemonic ways, but also even when expanded still carries with it proper ways to do the variously conceived genders we find ourselves adhering to the thread running along the woefully normative and the boisterously trans is still gender. We can't not be gendered. Even when that gender does things the binary would not like. We are still conceding that gender is and needs to be. I want to ask, what if we just don't is there as C Riley Snorton asks in a talk on black trans histories quote, perhaps something we can gain by giving up a willingness to be included in the project of gender and racialized gender at all unquote. If or rather since gender, which is always to say racialized gender operates as a description rather than description, there is something so much to be gained. It is not one equally balanced choice out of many. It is that gender forecloses the very thought of other possible things. So in giving it up, we allow ourselves to begin thinking about those other things. What comes in its wake, I do not know. Maybe there are new impediments we will face. Maybe we will check in out and run back to the binary, or maybe we will be swallowed by the abyss. Perhaps it will be all fields, flowers and vibes. I don't claim to know. And I don't think knowing is the point. It's the dreaming the imagining and the wondering, because gender has never let us wonder with absolute abandon. So all this is just to wonder as freely and joyously as possible about other things we might be not even laughing in gender's face or giving it the finger, but we might feel that urge. No, I don't want gender to even in this moment, or close the wondrous abandon still tether to responding to gender. I want to wonder and I want to know how we can make our dreams so deeply that we get lost having never even given gender another thought. It doesn't deserve our thoughts anymore. And that we deserve. Thank you all so much. Well, I'm going to present as well very fresh new work. So fresh that I'm not, I'm not sure if I have fully succinct ways of articulating the first part, yes, but later grace, bear with me. So I'm an artist. I work in several disciplines. I might call myself a disciplinary sled. And this evening, I'm going to talk to you about a latest body of work that I've been creating called human measure, which is my first piece of contemporary dance and all the sort of iterations that have spilled forth from it. So human measure is rooted in my knowledge of kinesiology, martial arts, sports science, and photography to reinterpret Eva Klein's anthropometry series. Not sure if many of you know the work of Eve Klein pseudo fluxes artists from France 1960s used women as paint brushes. So it's kind of easy way to dismiss him kind of divorcing them from their own subjectivities. He also invented this very vibrant blue called international Eve Klein blue paint. But a little known fact about Eve Klein is he was also a judo master and he published the first ever foundation of judo, which was an illustrated book which demonstrated the catas, which performed the base movements of judo. And as many of us in this room know, today in the US, there have been over 461 anti trans bills introduced into 41 states legislative sessions. And this is the highest amount of anti trans bills in US history. And as we know, most attacks focus on trans youth, banning trans athletes from participating in sports consistent with their gender identities and allowing for life savings medications. So in this moment, I ask myself, what does it mean to grapple with representation? And when cultural presence does not equate systemic power, how do we hold pleasure and power and sensuality, sexuality and presence in one hand, and the fact that your society is actively trying to disappear you in the other. So against this currently oppressive backdrop, I started to wonder, well, what instead of a metaphoric and symbolic work, I could make a work that through the process of learning would serve those involved far beyond the moment when the curtain has dropped. And I decided to tap my athletic training knowledge my many years of practicing mixed martial arts and boxing. However, rather than appropriate judo as Klein did, I drew inspiration from self defense and personal safety movements. I worked with a choreographer named Jasmine Albuquerque and she and I sponsored a personal safety workshop that was specifically for trans and non-binary people through a company called Impact Personal Safety. And that's significant because cis men get attacked for different reasons statistically than cis women. And there had never been any kind of statistical analysis of how this violence actually impacts trans and non-binary people. So I worked with Jasmine Albuquerque and five trans and non-gender non-conforming dancers, where Jasmine, Alucard Mendoza, Kenyan Calbosa, Bigos, Cadence Del Mar. And together we tapped into the magic of what it means to be in a body living in conversations with other bodies. I held several workshops led by trans practitioners, which included yes, martial arts and self defense, but also internal martial arts called Baguagian, somatic healing processes, all which informed the choreography, along with many iterations that have taken place. So here we would vulnerably reveal moments from our lived experience where we had needed tactics for deescalation or protection. We came up with movements unique to each performer's life. And this became the template for the movement. The theater for human measure is transformed into a dark room, a photographic dark room, lit only by red safety lights. This ambience connotes sirens, blood, the red light district and the history of photography. The stage is set with a large piece of cloth that is treated with a cyanotype solution. During the performance when bodies slam against the floor there are these blasts of light that reveal traces from the performer's bodies which create live photographs. So what you see here is kind of four cans, but in the final iteration of this piece I built 16 pro photo heads that were bounced onto a massive piece of silk, effectively making a massive 20 by 20 foot flashball. So the piece was lit so dimly by a red light that you could barely see the performer, so you were not given enough light. And then in these certain moments you were blasted with light being given too much light, which caused you to experience a retinal burn. And then furthermore I gelled the lights a little bit using my painter color theory, light orange which produced a Yves Klein blue after image. So these are just a few images from the dance just to give you a sense of the movement which for me was really trying to encapsulate that sort of dual mindset that one has to have to live through this moment of extreme pain while also like being your full self and in your full power, intimacy and destruction simultaneously. And the thing about the work is while we're making the dance these blasts of light were actually creating a live photographic process. So here you see on one side these are positions from the dance and on the other side you see the outlines. But actually you can't make a proper exposure in just a flash of light in a theater and so I had to make these cyanotypes in real time and so I started to make these props for the theatrical piece. And here I did a call on Instagram and there's over 20 performers, all trans and non-binary that came together to hold these positions from the dance for 20 minutes and this took place right after the first round of vaccinations and pride where we could take our masks off. And it was the first time that ever been around 20 trans and non-binary people mostly naked lying in the sun together. And I realized that it was actually, although this was a prop, it was actually a very important sort of process that I was experiencing. So here you can see the cyanotype being made and here you can kind of see what the cyanotype itself looks like. There was another component to this work which was the sound Eve Klein, though we can kind of dismiss him for being a kind of douchebag who used women's bodies to make his paintings. He was also like quite innovative and weird and interesting, all right? So we can't fully dismiss him and part of that was actually the paintings that he made were accompanied by a string orchestra of 17 instruments, the monotone symphony he called which is the sound of D major played infinitely for 20 minutes. And so when I recreated this piece, the sonic space that I created was instead of a choir of 17 trans and non-binary voices, each singing the key of D major at all 17 octaves simultaneously. But unlike the string instrument, which of course when you play a bowed instrument and try to hold a single note, you're inevitably gonna accidentally ebb into a minor chord and fail. The thing with the body is you don't ebb into a minor but you do need to breathe. And so in our score, you hear the sound of the constant striving to sing the D major which is effectively the sound of ta-da which is a sound of hope, it's a utopic sound and then the need for breath over and over again. And so the end, the work concludes when the fabric is detached from the floor and it's dunked into troughs of waters and then it's strung up over the audience. Dripping in a liquid mixed with perspiration, the cyanotype develops in real time before the audience's eyes. It's a brilliant hue of blue marked with the outline of fallen bodies. Leaning into abstraction, these bodily silhouettes are suggestive of the outlines of act up and black lives matter protests. Shadow burns of victims are caught in atomic blasts. Traces of lives lived but simultaneously reflect a gentle sensuality, even care of floating, resting and tenderness. And this past Sunday, as in three days ago, March 31st, Transday of Visibility, I mounted a large scale action inspired by human measure but specifically the act of the cyanotype in Washington DC and I created a 60 foot by 15 foot cyanotype on the Washington Mall. The piece is called Etched in Light. I was invited by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the Queer Equity Institute to present this work. As a sort of trans justice art action and I had over 140 different trends and non-binary performers and this was presented as well with an incredible vocal group called Blood is Here which is Carmina Escobar, Raca Cordova and Dorian Wood. We also invited a reproductive justice advocate, Viva Ruiz, from Thank God from Abortion. Some of you may know her, she's brilliant and her daughter, the trans black poet, Michael, love Michael, to set the day in this idea of chosen family, literally the blood we choose, the intersections between reproductive justice, trans bodily autonomy. So this durational performance resulted in the live creation of one of the world's largest cyanotypes as a mediagetic spectacle on Transday of Visibility and the National Mall in DC. And this was our call to action. We, the deviants, the queers, the keepers of the spoiled identity. So what we're making here today is a cyanotype which is like an early photographic experience which predates the camera. The queens and the fairies, the Nellies, the Nancy's and the Fanny. The height of the sun is what predigates the exposure. Wherever your body lies, it will create an outline. Those of the reprobate mind, the hermaphrodite, the chicks with dick, and, and will always be the enemy. And so what does it mean to think about representation in a time where we're actively being erased? And what does it mean to hold our power, our sensuality, our sexuality, and our beauty at the same time that we have to deal with struggle and erasure and pain? So, etched in light was performed on a 15 by 60 foot piece of muslin coated in cyanotype solution and capitalizing on the presence of over 600 trans-non-binary people who were in attendance. I invited these performers to come lie on the canvas, basking prone in the warm rays. Performers collectively held still in these solar exposures. The performers then washed the print in narrow troughs of water echoing the architecture of the Lincoln Memorial Pool and lovingly bathing every fold of the material. And this is, blood is here, this musical collective with Dorian, Carmina, and Rocco. And I don't know if any of you know their work, they're experimental vocalists who completely improvise, but they too are able to sing as if like cherubs are floating down from parting clouds and like the bowels of hell are erupting with the most noxious gas you've ever heard. And so kind of, they started at one end of the cyanotype, Dorian always at one end and the other two almost were like a sundial slowly marching along and keeping the time of the exposure with their bodies and their voices. I also brought my incredible dancers who had performed in the theatrical part and they had rose petals which we like slowly sprinkled on the bodies which of course made them their ways into the impression of the cyanotype as well. Also the sort of color of I guess the trans flag. And so here we are developing it and you can see the water changing and the image coming before your eyes. And then yeah, we pulled it out and we had these four massive canvases which we then ran down the mall with and all in there. So thank you everybody for being here. Thank you to affirmations for hosting us to Dennis Mitchell for supporting trans disruptions. It's like Columbia Apocalypse right now out there and so I'm super pleased that we're all gathered here. This affirmation series for those of you who haven't been here before is really innovative and I really appreciate what the architecture school is trying to do in terms of trying to stage real conversations where people are trying to talk to each other in different ways about urgent ideas and I think this is a really good example of it. So thank you so much. So they asked us, I'm the only one really following the assignment and that's fine. No. So just to explain the minimalism of what I'm gonna do after the package of gender has been dropped and this beautiful fabric has been created. I want to talk about three images that connect to the project that I'm working on right now which is called Unworlding and Aesthetics of Collapse and so I have three images that I'm gonna show you. This project is sort of pulling back from earlier queer theory that really made world building into its project and its goal and I think many of you will agree that given the way that the world looks right now world building is not exactly the task that we want to set for ourselves and so instead drawing from work that has been loosely gathered together under the heading of an architecture I've been speaking about unbuilding and dismantling and undoing and unmaking and those terms are not just the opposite of the things that they are undoing they actually have their own aesthetics and they attach to their own political orientation and in the process they make transness into a different kind of project. So that's what I'm sort of gonna be laying out for you in the images that I'm looking at. The images I'm looking at sort of think about worlds within worlds but also speculative fictions that rather than imagining how this world could be leave this world altogether, okay and I'm gonna actually give you an example of a speculative fiction that does that almost no speculative fiction is able to leave this world behind but I think I found one that does and then finally the artists that I'm working with are deeply interested in something I would call entropy and entropy as you know is the second law of thermodynamics by which we are being asked to recognize that the world we live in is rapidly unraveling making is exactly a human activity and then a human attempt to manage and control world but world is an entropic undoing and unraveling so what would work look like that moved along the grain of the entropic was interested in disorder and re-imagined the body through that kind of vocabulary that's the question that I'm sort of set and I'm gonna answer using these three images and I think at the end of this you'll see that these are not simply the same kinds of trans images with a different spin they actually re-imagined the relationship between gender and world so we could drop that package of gender as Marquis advises us or we in more realistic terms we would have to drop everything within which gender signifies that's the meaning of unwielding one would have to make un-make all of the frames that hold gender in a particular place so when those frames are undone what does the body look like okay let's start with the first slide am I doing it? all right do I do everything? okay I thought I would talk about this slide because it is the poster image for trans disruptions and it's an absolutely beautiful painting made by a former MFA student from Columbia Linus Borgo who had his first solo show in Manhattan last fall at the Yosemila Gallery this was his MFA painting and it's just so amazing there are lots of different stories behind it but I think if I've given you this vocabulary of unwielding and entropy and even apocalypse which I began with you can see all of that at work in this painting in which the world that is supposed to hold the trans body is in fact electrified and coming apart okay we don't know when we look at this painting whether we are looking at something that's underwater or bathed in a strange ethereal light it's not moonlight exactly is it infrared? is it artificial? is it lightning? there are animals in the frame that don't belong in the same frame and so there's a kind of disordering of world and that disordering is something that the transgender body has in some way affected that's how one way I would read this painting Linus actually is somebody who has been a painter for a long time and just as he was getting going he had an electrical accident that damaged one of his arms and you can see that in the painting he is literally conducting electricity through his left arm and that parts of that arm were then amputated which obviously for a painter is a kind of a catastrophic event but he turns this, he links the disability to his transness under the heading of monstrum monstrum which is a Latin to show but is also the Latin for a kind of portent of things to come and he claims the category of monstrosity for himself and then turns himself into a part of monstrous nature he isn't a part from nature but noise he a natural element in a natural world he is an unnatural element in an electrified unnatural world and that's in many ways what this painting is about and you can see that it's got a kind of there's an x-ray effect to it again asking whether we're looking at radiation in fact are we looking at a kind of apocalyptic process or are we looking at something like the cyanotype that Castles just explained to us the way in which the body is becoming transparent reminding us and this is a reference to Paul Presciato's work that the trans body isn't just the exterior it's not just a morphology it's not just an outline it is also an internal set of dynamics a molecular body that science and the pharmaceutical and the pornographic grab take hold of and turn into a place to conduct capital right the trans body is that too and all of that is sort of gathered here in this painting called I Sing the Body Electric and so we're using it literally as the poster for the trans disruption conference to you know enter into these conversations about worlds of unnatural beauty the body that doesn't want to fit into the world as it is but takes as its mission the unmaking and unbuilding of the world that decided that it was the problem right so that's the orientation of the monstrous trans body this is its disruptive potential and in the process and you can see this all through Borgo's work there are new readings of embodiment available in which the body is harmed, wounded, cut and you'll remember Ava Hayward's beautiful essay it'll grow back like a starfish about the way in which the cut is not the undoing of the trans body it is it's making and that's taken up very literally by Borgo who takes his cut which was this electrical accident and like a kind of Frankenstein figure the figure that Stryker writes about he becomes something else through the electrocution that he suffers he becomes part of a kind of natural order that we cannot even see in the everyday so it's the extraordinary, it's the supernatural it's the extra natural, it's the unnatural but not natural okay so the next as promised this next artist is going to lead the way to a speculative fiction that does not reproduce the terms of this world in the world to come okay and if any of you have thought a little bit about speculative fiction you'll remember Jameson's argument about science fiction where he says it's so impossible for us to imagine the future because we just trail all of the ideology of the present with us and we just keep creating the present in whatever futures we imagine but what if we didn't okay this is a beautiful painting by Renee Gladman called Untitled Black City and some of you will know Renee Gladman's work she's a sculptural poet I guess is how I would see it she's a language poet she sculpts words and she used words to create sculptures she's a black poet and writer and suddenly she you know in this exhibit that I saw last summer people who had seen versions of her drawings in some of her poetry books were introduced to this incredible artwork that she also produces and you'll notice in this black city drawing it it's etching on black paper and a lot of the material in all of the images in the show are architectural there's the sense of a house but not exactly a house this is a facade, it's not a house there's a lot of acemic writing scribbles that could be writing but never actually deliver words and then there are fragments and of course everything only has meaning against blackness blackness is the foundation it isn't the background it is the condition of possibility for any of this odd meaning to even appear but alongside that Renee Gladman has written a fantastic almost unreadable I would say set of speculative fictions called the Ravikia series and it's four books starts with the event factory where somebody of unknown origin has arrived somewhere else of unknown specificity and wants to learn something about that place but doesn't know how to and there are no guidebooks and they have no language and they get lost okay that's event factory and it ends with the work that I think kind of relates to this piece which is called the houses of Ravikia and in the houses of Ravikia the architecture is in fact the character and the condition of architecture in Ravikia is that it is flexible it gets up and moves around and it is never where you left it and so the narrator is looking for number 92 and of course they will never find number 92 we also don't know who the narrator is and we don't know their gender they left that package somewhere else we don't know their name the person is an outsider and all they know is that they have to find their way to number 92 so that's what I mean about it's a speculative fiction that doesn't drag the ideology of the current with it and it instead writes everything from the perspective of not knowing, not finding being lost, being an outsider literally wondering nothing happens there are new terms like geoscarging the narrator says that she is geoscarging to try to find number 96 actually and number 92 and we enter therefore into a world that we cannot know that cannot be mapped that isn't available for GPS or any other kind of tracking mechanism so of number 96, Gladman writes it wasn't number 96 it was nothing not even a lot what was it? how do you describe it? it was whatever you call turning the corner as a place turning the corner as a place and that is as good of a definition of architecture as you're going to get in this book it is turning a corner and that is the meaning of place that you turn a corner so in many ways I would say that Gladman is an architect she's building absence into places that should be something but instead are not she's looking for places that cannot appear where they are and refuse to appear in the form that the map demands right so the map is a colonial tool requires you to be where you say you are and to have been there instead this is the unspeakable the indescribable the absent the place that will never appear on a map this is deeper more porous darker and more complex but it is not the complexity of high European art it isn't Proust it isn't Kafka it's the complexity of an alternative grammar altogether that wants to leave that particular tradition aside and walk towards something else right and that's hard it makes it hard to read the books and it makes it hard to work with the books so here are just a few other bits from the book so you can see you can begin to taste the grammar of this world so Gladman makes this proposal a proposal that sort of what if every word that was written about a material system changed it what if every word that was written about a material system changed it she writes the city was a novel in progress and everyone knew this we spoke jokingly of ourselves as novellians and this banter gave us space okay so they are literally writing the city that they're in into being and I know that's kind of an old trope in some ways but the unarchitectural spin is that they're also unwriting it this isn't a novel with characters where people appear and they grow and they develop it is a novel where no one can appear and no one will arrive and no one will be anywhere at the end so it's a kind of quantum proposal if you like which change is constant and decisive and outside of the western episteme the demands that change have a consequence and an impact and a cause and so on for Gladman the city needed us that's the relationship to the city the city needed us and as a novel it's inhabited by us only through language it is a thinking text horizon is a sentence and she says we were inside a living structure ourselves living and we went on this way for a long time now for anyone who knows Matt O'Clock that's almost a description of like something like Bronx floors right we were inside a living structure ourselves living and we went on this way for a long time this cutting into space this creating absence and working with silence is the the grammar of the unarchitectural Matt O'Clock said why hang things on walls he said when the wall itself is so much more challenging when the floor is more challenging as a medium why put things on the wall what's wrong with the floor and so he made his cut into the floor he did it in Day's End he does it in Bronx floors and this means that he is cutting out the foundation and that's literally what Gladman does she's already removed the foundation and makes it impossible for you to navigate through the text alright so hopefully that's baffling enough and we but sit with this there's a whole series of these drawings that she made and all of them are inviting you into a world where you will understand nothing okay my last one is a decisively sort of trans-anarchitecture an unworlding image and I've been working a little bit with this beautiful sculptural work by Jesse Darling Jesse Darling won the Turner Prize this past year they made a big deal in England about this is the first trans man to win the Turner Prize they just don't know who are trans because quite a few trans people have actually won this prize they just don't realize that's fine but this is called Gravity Road and you can see that it's really about challenging gravity in the same way that Renee Gladman was challenging complexity in a western episteme this is an entropic sculpture Gravity Road was the name of the first roller coaster and so it's a roller coaster that Darling assembled in a gallery in I think it's in Freiburg and it was formally a swimming pool that had been constructed during the Third Reich and under those conditions that swimming pool was supposed to be a kind of showcase for the perfect body for the Nordic body, for the Aryan body for Laney-Reefin style to celebrate this white perfect body and for that reason Jesse Darling wanted to call attention to debility, disability, uncertainty, precarity the falling body, the fact that you will want to go fast and you will also fall off this absolutely shaky entropic structure but it's also a kind of a symbol if you like for the trans body that doesn't seek perfection and doesn't seek repair and doesn't seek to inhabit the space well or perfectly but wants to undo the logic of the space that it enters and that's what I see in this body is an unspooling in this image is an unspooling model of being a body that is literally losing momentum as it goes is it odds with capital entropically refuses to be a vehicle that accumulates meaning through a collaboration with capital so we see a kind of deconstructed roller coaster and it's twisting together all of the concepts that I've tried to pull out of these images pleasure motion structures architectures and architectures bodies it's destroying the history of that pool as a place to showcase the perfect white body and I'm going to close with it because I think it's a beautiful gateway to the terrain that we're here to explore on this panel and for the next three days unwielding collapse destitution impossible futures but also the future of change okay there's so much on the table or whatever on the whatever but maybe we can start with actually and there's please get your questions ready and your interventions there's so many clever people here not clever people with amazing ideas here so but I want to start maybe with the future change and that is in a way I think that this is a question that that is crossing all your presentations and I'm so glad that that was add to the to the questions and my feeling is that there's also a we definition or kind of a definition of politics and also what's the side of politics and that's kind of crucial in a place like this where we kind of inherited this idea that politics were happening in cities were allocated were clearly allocated in places like cities in squares and institutions but somehow the way you're talking of the future or you're addressing the future of change is very different it's actually against that or I'm doing that or maybe we'll see for instance the kind of the after image right like that and then the if score comes there there's such a very different allocation of politics that is happening between the eye and the other bodies and and I think the package is definitely kind of this this attachment or this attachment or kind of doing the the attachment of the package with the body there's so much there so I don't know I have the feeling that when you were showing for instance Linus Borger's body also was very different it's a body that it's undoing the possibility of thinking the notion of nature or the body as self-confined or sipped out there and and I think those are the places where politics could be allocated or the future change could be allocated I have the feeling that you're bringing to this place where so many times it's been claimed that politics are happening to the city as in the city or something very different and maybe we can start here yeah I mean I mean I can I can hear that in both of these presentations the way in which castles is reimagining the flag for example and reimagining the way in which the body has been used as a paintbrush but here is used in a really different way in the context of trans collaboration but also Marquis like refusing the the language as given I think we're all we're all kind of saying no to the political as it's being framed by the law and and by medicine as just one thing or as voting for this person or you know the main mundane version of mainstream politics sort of has no place in in in this conversation absolutely um because I I find myself unimpressed I think is the word that I want to use unimpressed with all these mechanisms all these quote unquote valid or legitimate mechanism for doing politics that this is how you really make change or establish change or this is what it really means to actually be this kind of subject who then carries an archive of various kind of things so unimpressed with that I want so many other kinds of things and it also feels to me like it forecloses so many other kinds of things that we might be able to do that we might think dream understand ourselves as etc so for me I find myself so so often wanting to one deeply skeptical of when anyone says this is the legitimate way to do or this is how this kind of change is enacted find myself immediately skeptical of that and I find myself wanting to to move toward the the modes of life that perhaps in so many ways are illegible are unknown are under the radar that don't even heed the radar as such and where are those things how are those things being manifested are they even being manifested so I feel like I want to try to not seek those things out because there also might be ways that they don't want to be sought out but to you know see if I can move through them feel them understand myself as being kind of gifted with those kinds of tremors and things like that and that looks any number of ways and no ways and I want to try to you know take heed of of all that kind of stuff yeah I think I'm interested in thinking about that formally from a visual perspective how do we how do we deny how do we rupture the ways in which we look by either taking like both the flash and the retinal burn is is one way or the literally the physiological hijacking of the body to make us realize how much our bodies are present in analyzing what it is that we're seeing and how unstable representation really is how so much of it is mediated through technology and through the physiology of our own bodies which allegedly work the same but they don't they work completely differently and then likewise something like the cyanotype you're left with an outline so it's again another form of refusal that refuses a surveying sort of voyeuristic gaze and that particular action at the mall was I was invited by the national center for transgender equality which was actually trying to harness for the first time the trans and non-binary vote right so yeah we need to vote right but no one wants to vote for anybody right now right and so in the past I have done these artworks that are very much in service of non of like grassroots organizations because I feel like artists have a way of rupturing the imagination beyond the polemic and that we can actually serve in that way to move conversations forward much like a monkey wrench into the subconscious you know but when it came to like this idea of voting I was pretty you know yes and no you know and so creating something that I think we need to be working on many platforms you know in all the ways and that we all have to start where we're at with the skill sets that we have the ways that we could contribute to that well one thing I would say castles you know I was in one of castles works over the summer is that when you when you talk about the process and we we see that very beautiful film that you've made you actually don't get how transformative of an experience it is to be in that action because to be like in a semi-naked state with other semi-naked trans and non-binary people for for many people that's the first time that that has even happened and you're in a context where your body is signifying completely outside of a cisgender environment that that's hardly ever the case not in changing rooms not in even in a gay bar there's so many so few spaces where those bodies are signifying in relationship to one another and that putting that emotion is like you know it does change the meaning of gender in the way that you are talking about it marquise because it isn't a package coming from the post office it's actually coming from somewhere else multiple packages all at once being exchanged many packages yeah yeah well yes and that's true I mean this was really so it's like about denying but it's also about creating community but very particular community for a closed audience and that's why it was initially made as a prop and then I realized oh this is a performance for us actually this is for us and so to have Dorian and Carmina and Rocco singing over us and to like yeah to take that moment with your elbow grazing someone's knee and just feeling the literal energetic flow of those voices flowing into you it's a very powerful experience let's open it to the audience I'm sure there's many questions here we also have probably questions from people that are remote and there one two yeah let's start hi thank you this was amazing I was at the the Leslie Lohman gallery on Sunday there was an event for queer Palestine event and the Palestinian American artist Noor Anon was speaking sort of we were talking about this like idea of visibility and invisibility and I'm really interested in what you're talking about Jack with destruction and she specifically brought up this idea of right the the pride flag and I can't stop thinking about it since I saw this image of the IDF soldier on top of the ruins in Gaza with the fucking pride flag and so now as you're saying right that image that image I saw I just will never be able to stand under that flag again or you know associate I feel like with that flag without thinking about that image and so then yeah so she was talking about this idea of visibility and invisibility and do we all actually want to be visible and how visible do we want to be and who's deciding this right as you're talking about and so essentially she was saying you know that the most important work actually especially right to free Palestine has to be invisible it it can't be visible it can't be public because of you know the structures outside of our decisions that that box us in and say we can't say this or we can say that or this is allowed and this isn't or this is international law and we're just going to fucking violate it so yeah I'm wondering if you could talk about that it specifically because seal I'm interested in this the flag and how it like can can change or be destroyed or and this idea that sometimes we don't have control over that it's sort of outside of us thanks well I think the idea of nationhood is really problematic right I don't know I mean initially that image of a flag it's like it's not it's not it's like a a sail you know it's a kite it's many different it's like it's bodies in motion I think really it was about putting it in the sky you know from being made by the sun on the ground to elevating yeah but we can't we can't talk about you know this concept of trans liberation or trans visibility without thinking about what's happening in Gaza right now and of course these liberations are deeply intersectional and intertwined and I think you know for example at our action many people were wearing the kafia as a way of a gesture of solidarity you know it didn't want to it's not a work specifically about Palestine but of course in this moment you cannot think you cannot think about the idea of lying prone as a queer person without thinking of the sort of solidarity and importance of of of thinking of what it is to rest who can rest who cannot rest what it is to put your body on a line whose body which body how these various geographies and nations and borders really delineate safety in this moment right and so you know I think what I think about is trying to create as intersectional a sort of representation and not in a box check way in a way of really truly creating relationships between my team members between those who are there and building community because we do have these incredibly oppressive and destructive and horrific things that are happening and so it is really true through these ideas of alternative family hood of of trans and queer sibling hood that we that we can call upon our strength to be able to to uh to hold to to build those moments of privilege so that we can seek out and help others so I guess that's how I think about it but I do think you know I also think about about the about resisting representation you know and as much as we're we're laying down the ground during your being seen and then you're also resisting it so I think of it as like a sort of something that I'm grappling with thank you so much for these thoughts today I think I wanted to maybe go back Marquise to your opening and to kind of thank you for this amazing sort of visual of the package and being hunted or hunted by the package and I was kind of waiting at some point almost in anticipation for you to get a phone call and for the phone call to announce that the package is coming from inside the house I got scared I was scared um I I want to think about um houseness or the house in your um in the imagery of what you told today and and the kind of idea or maybe run through with the metaphor the narrative and think about the way that the package maybe doesn't necessarily find us but finds the house first or the logistics of the package and maybe tight a little bit jack into the the narrative of the of the city that is in undoing or place that is in the middle of doing and undoing and somehow evades the structures of delivery upon which gender oftentimes sort of depends right and that the places of eluding or of being fugitives of um being located maybe as a concept sometimes maybe works um in both both against and for this exact sort of place of being able to kind of work with and against being found by gender and maybe gender could be another place to think about maybe the kind of structures of surveillance of naming of being named of being seen maybe just to throw the house and kind of a little bit you know get a little maybe architectural and a little literal with it that is awesome um this is great i'm just gonna say words right now um in response to that just amazing amazing invitation uh yeah the the package showing up at the house uh and perhaps not for me but intended for the house because the house is on a grid um it's it's legible to i mean it occupies a very specific kind of grammar that is locatable um that is fixed that doesn't go anywhere and so of course the package can come here because this house is not going anywhere but then what that makes me think about is how i am a homebody to my core i don't want to go anywhere like ever um so i'm thinking then about my inhabitation of the house the home and i'm also not someone who understands the home as a as it's often connoted i'm not someone who understands the home as a place of safety or refuge necessarily or anything like that i don't think i can understand it in that way for a variety of reasons um but i think the way i inhabit that space that place uh is one that kind of sort of attempts to to not be at home so for example uh when i'm at home i guess it's very particular to me but when i'm at home like there are almost no lights on like ever um there might be maybe a desk lamp or something like that but it's it's hard to know that someone is actually home um so how then how then am i occupying or not occupying but inhabiting moving through the space in ways that even elude the the way that the space is being read that if you are home then i know you're home someone is home but in many ways you don't know i'm even at home so how might that then allow for a kind of illusivity or fugitivity which is a term i always find myself returning to uh i like i really like that i really really like that because it allows for capacity within or outside of or irrespective of the structure or the structuration of the house itself because that package is not for me it's for this home that i may or may not be at and i kind of like that i really like that i really like that i don't know if you want to say something jack well yeah just to say that i mean in the question is already kind of the answer which which is in order for the the package of gender to arrive one already has to be sort of housed with an address and all of that that is undone by the renae gladman that an address is not there for a package to be delivered to in the first place and then the one other thing i wanted to say is like who was even gathered under a pride flag before that you know what i mean like that's the purpose of the pride flag is to legitimate military operations and we should not expect anything else from a pride flag and therefore that's why we're looking for other languages to express the kind of political intentions that are embedded in queer and and trans belonging because these other languages inevitably lead to a pride flag you know embedded in a military operation so you know that's i mean i feel like we're all struggling with this is how to take apart the language that seems to be required of us in order to say the things that we want to say against the system that allows us to say them and that's this is the you know the complexity of this relationship between structure and and self-body here we've got the mic will come to you yeah we started at the back right you started okay sorry i had i thought a very coherent question but i'm not an academic so apologies but i'm an artist and i guess i've been thinking a lot about and reading a little bit about queer abstraction and thinking like by extension as a trans person like is there a trans abstraction and i guess i mean jack has kind of already given some examples of this but i guess i'm curious for the other two of you um i don't know how to answer this actually but like what does trans art look like without representing the body and i'm sorry castles because obviously the bodies you sort of alluded to that but the body is so central to your work but um and i guess the layers of that are like how does legibility come into like how legible does our art need to be to like a non trans audience to a non-art audience like how do those questions come into the way that you think about your work i yeah i mean yes it's true that the body is central to my work but i make a lot of works that leave remnants right so for example my piece becoming an image which takes place in pitch darkness where i beat the living daylights out of 2000 pounds of clay and actually this is kind of an earlier iteration of human measure the only way in which you see the work is maybe maybe 20 very bright like flash photographs are taken and in that moment you see glimpses but maybe 99.9 percent of the work you don't see but what you're left with is this sculpture that stands in as a sort of faithful index to this violence this attack which is actually forensic it's marked indexically with my knuckles my elbows my knees you can see hair follicles so it kind of does both create a truly abstract sculptural form but it is also one that is completely indexical to something that did happen you know so i really think about the indexical in the trace as in terms of both being serving abstraction or resisting representation but also speaking to a sort of forensic truth and i'm interested in that sort of overlap i'll say it's really really quickly i don't understand myself as an artist but i love abstraction and i guess it's come from my understanding of myself as a theorist i love the abstract and the the non-concrete the non-material and i find myself often getting the question of what does this look like like i don't know like at all but for me there is there's something wondrous in not knowing what a thing looks like and it also feels to me that i would if i may if i may i would say the body is central to your work it also feels to me that the body is a medium through which to arrive at or move through other kinds of things other kinds of possibilities so it's not simply about the body representing the body there's the body we can see it but how the body allows for openings elsewhere and that to me is there's something generated in that i think if you keep speaking it okay oh there we go um jack mostly my question is for you but certainly i'd love to hear any responses to it um my question is about uh how you're defining nature um or how you're thinking about nature and your work um and i'm thinking i think i think in my words to victor frankenstein susan striker says the trans body is an unnatural body um and i don't know i've been wondering about this especially in terms of your use of wildness and what nature means to you versus what wildness means because you spoke a little bit about it with like supernatural extra-natural but i don't know i just like to hear you speak more about what how you're thinking about nature and maybe you know what that means and how it relates to some of the other terms you've used yeah yeah that's a that's a great question um because you know we're nature's one of those words where we presume we we know what it means but it also names an order uh that sometimes gets upgraded to normative you know and uh is a system within which the body can become known and it can become known as something that fits or something that doesn't fit so i kind of think of nature as a system or a regime rather than a place or an actual entity um but what i liked in linus's painting was that he was able to sort of trip that system a little bit in order through his own experience of electrocution to make the electrified body you know in this very frankensteinian way into the site of new birth of some kind and i'm not really given over to the new i'm really i think i'm not trying to claim that there's necessarily something new but i think it it it's more a kind of different set of associations that what one would find if we were just using natural as a foundational script yeah um but you're right i mean it's it's i mean a little loosey-goosey in the way i'm using it and wildness is a kind of um it's the intensification that is seen as being the outside of a civilized order and therefore something that has to be held at bay that but that on the other hand i'm saying actually holds within it a kind of anarchic force that you know we should we should aspire to and investigate thank you so jack i'm very struck by something you said at the end of your segment where you said the trans body that the trans body wants to undo the logic of the space that enters so then my question is do we what happens to that logic do we cast logic aside or does our task become more so to rebuild or resignify a different kind of logic and then to put it kind of like in terms of like the package analogy that marquis brought up um what is the everything else that we stand to gain from getting rid of that gender package i'll be probably quite brief i don't know what the everything else is uh i kind of don't care what the everything else is either um because i i mean to i guess it won't be brief so i i don't i don't care about what everything else is and this feels like a cop out it can be anything we don't need to pin it down beforehand it feels very much like a cop out but it's quite genuine for me because to presume that we know what the everything else is then brings the drags the the other kind of things into that moe or that imagination and i don't want to do that so i think for me it's very much a practice of i don't know if it's like a kirkagardian leap or a finonian leap or some kind of something leaping jumping or i don't know moving in the dark or something like that such that we must by necessity move through that as it's happening we can't bring something else into it we can't bring the the criteria for legibility that we have now into an understanding of at the way to capture that whatever that something else is which again feels like a cop out but i am hoping that it is not it's actually quite a genuine way of offering ourselves to whatever that might be whatever that might look like or feel like or etc i i will be brief i'll just say you know i love matta clauc's statement that an architecture seeks to solve no problem and i would apply it here in that the the undoing of the system is not really it's not particularly the goal the goal is to not appear within the terms of the system that have been presented to you in terms of you being outside of them so what happens to the logic after who cares like the the goal is not to know what comes next the goal is to figure out how to dismantle this particular set of associations and regimes of visibility and so on this is okay um so my question is from marquis um i've been thinking about this for like five minutes trying to make it make sense so if it's a little over the place okay um so i guess like to use your analogy of the box or the package rather um and when you were talking about like package getting dropped and someone coming back and giving to you i i was thinking about my own experience and i feel like a lot of times when the package is getting back to you it's not like oh you dropped this it's like oh you better not forget that package or like if you forget it next time you're not going to be able to get this package because you're in the hospital um so i guess like my question is really around the it's three intersections i guess um and before i get to the question i was also thinking about what you said about see riley snorting and i'm i also read that book and one of the things um he said that was really interesting was how flush is fungible and as a black trans or black trans person or a black non-conforming person when you're unfudgible with your gender you're also unfungible with your race so as you become transgender you also become transracial so i guess like my question is when we as a black queer person when you feel these unknown futures that do not exist within the lived material world but you know that but someone ascribes your maleness based on your genitalia in a way that has life altering consequences how does this future look in a safe way and i guess like it's obviously you want to be you want to look you want to liberate yourself right and i mean of course liberation doesn't come without violence but how does that look it makes you feel a little double consciousness um but then also i'm also reflecting on the case that happened in South Carolina where the first trans hate crime got prosecuted by the federal court and then on one hand it's like progress right you you think progress because like protection but then also it's like this is a type of progress reform so i don't know what the question is so like i'm contemplating both of these things as i've been listening like one liberation um but the cost of liberation but then also what this liberation looks like and how do we want that liberation look like and how can i really i mean i probably answered this but can it exist in states it doesn't all these questions but yeah this is a marvelous marvelous provocation question which will in my response will be unsatisfying um which is which is fine which is perfectly fine i yeah i think the short ish answer i would give is that it looks like it looks like a a being with others and i'm purposely using others and not other people um because especially recently i've been thinking deeply about the ways that that we can relate to and encounter and move alongside various modes of of life and non-life too so it when when i'm being dragged back into this world uh in various kinds of ways that could have life altering uh in deeply harmful kinds of consequences i find myself wanting to i don't know i find myself on the one hand being incredibly frustrated and angry sometimes uh while also understanding because sometimes that bringing back that pulling back is an attempt to try to keep me from straying in ways that someone might feel will be harmful for me um but i find myself wanting deeply to continue to move outside of that with others so how like what does that look like how does that feel uh and what kinds of possibilities are there so it's not it's not for me at least simply again i'm a homebody it's not simply going out and doing things with others or something like that it rarely looks like that for me it's i don't know having a FaceTime conversation or it's reading this book that i've been waiting to drop for like years it's doing those kind of things it's sharing sharing feelings that i might have felt this thing and i know that i have a friend or someone i don't even know who's also felt that it's those kinds of moments for me knowing that i'm not the only one who seeks to to refuse gender as such and then is constantly brought back i know there are so many other people who are feeling that so how can i then understand myself as fundamentally not alone fundamentally entangled this is language that denise for erica silva uses that i am always trying to to adhere to how can i understand myself as entangled with so many others who who have have also refused in the way that i've refused such that that we're now kind of connected or in relation in a different kind of way that brings me a sense of contentment something i don't know if those are the right words but that that brings me something and also and also to know that there are so so many other entities out there who are not doing that to me who are not trying to drag me back in there are so many ways that i might literally be out behind my home just walking through the trees and knowing that or another a quick example uh like i my partner and i we um this is the redwood national forest this past summer which was astounding absolutely astounding and i texted a friend of mine who i've known for 13 years texted a picture of one of the trees that is absolutely massive like the width of this room and my friend said there is so much wisdom in that tree right there that how long it's been here and to be able to know that i mean i guess it sounds the type of way but that tree to me has nothing of me that tree does not ask me to do gender or anything like that in any kind of way it's sitting there allowing me to touch it allowing me to sit there in front of it and that is absolutely beautiful to me absolutely beautiful to me so there are ways that i think about a kind of entanglement with all these other all these other entities that are not in fact demanding anything of me but simply we exist in this space together and that i love that so so much and that bring me a sense of kind of calm peace contentment serenity perhaps tranquility whatever kind of word but it is hard it's so so difficult so difficult but nonetheless we still try may you want more this right here hi i appreciate it hello okay i have two different questions you got to pick one if anybody who wants to answer i'm really intrigued and thank you for expressing so much about entanglement in a lot of in all of y'all's discussions entanglement and yet disruption like when there's disrupt when when disruptions convene so i'm really interested in the kind of like oxymoronic moments of movement of the undoing of living in it and so on so one of my first questions is when or how does a something becomes or become yours as we're building absence i'm really intrigued by the by something becoming or appearing and then disappearing right so kind of like that if that's of interest the question that i'm most interested in is about love because as i was listening to you all there was a lot of loving experiences that i was feeling in the undoing in the bodies coming together and being entangled being left tracking appearances more so than representation so what is the role of love in this other world in the world making in the new grammars in what is that is it a love ethic is it a love politics what is it and and i'm intrigued even if that's the language we may want to use in this new world in this i'm worlding in this unsettled world many of us are intrigued by that's my question to you know i think like for myself when i was a younger artist so much of my work was about screaming at cis people like wake the fuck up you know and i think my work has really changed in the last maybe seven or eight years as i get older to think about what it was like for me to not have someone like me also to grow up in the shadow of these crises to have like all my elders just obliterated you know and so what it is for me to be able to work with young artists and to create these spaces where they can radically explore things where their identity is like i'm the redwood you know not to say that i'm the redwood but you know what i mean i don't care like we're there to to make the art you know it's not about that in that moment you know and and i do think it's about a sort of care and ethic of care um and i think that when uh as artists we bestow that kind of care through every part of our practice that that is an ethic of love and it's incredibly generative it's not simply something that's altruistic it's something that also like gives to me and heals me it's reciprocal i do i do really like the language of love um i don't know exactly why uh because maybe that also goes to um but i do like it i think it attempts at the very least i think it attempts to signify something perhaps ineffable that it as a word is not the thing that is trying to say it is um but it's pointing to pointing indirectly to something to something else so i do like the word love and i think for me in the work that i am doing uh is attempting and we'll probably talk about this later um what i'm attempting to do is to whatever extent i might be accused of hating or disliking or wanting to do away with people's understandings of themselves genders etc it is not for me primarily at all that i am um trying to deem a dislike for the thing that they want to hold on to but it's a profound love for all the other kinds of things that we might have been where not for these this thing that you're trying to hold on to for various kinds of reasons so love i think is profoundly profoundly fundamental to the thing that i'm trying to to think about because it motivates perhaps it motivates the very move to uh to to desire or understand that the you that you think you might be does not have to be the you that you are uh and there are so many other ways so many other iterations of you whatever you is that are lovable that are desirable uh that we can move through in various ways that do not foreclose certain kinds of connections between us and i want to i want to look toward or move toward that in in different kinds of ways and i think that feels that feels like love to me that feels like love to me or friendship as we've been talking about for a while so yeah we nearly finished because i'm not going to spoil the love thing because this was this was really nice so i won't i won't put my stuff on that but i have two questions that are absolutely frivolous um one marquise i want to know what video games you were going off to play and second i want to know why marquise and i don't have the shoes yeah that's all because it's just not fair i mean like i need that height okay okay we take the chance to talk about video games whenever i can um so or an or anime gaming panel tomorrow yes yes and so i just wanted you to give us a little bit of yeah absolutely i will talk about video games or anime whenever anyone ever wants to um video games so what's what am i doing right now i am my goodness so what am i playing i'm playing a bunch of things all the time um so genres i like uh action rpg's turn-based rpg's um but i did not expect to be talking about this right now but here we are um i also love playing like survival crafts slash horror kinds of games with my partner and my brother-in-law which are super super great i love me an open world kind of game even though those are like the market is being incredibly saturated with open world games but that's okay because they're so wonderful um what am i playing right now i am playing uh i'm working slowly working my way through uh horizon forbidden west uh which is just amazing and phenomenal it's the second iteration of the horizon series it just came out on pc so i'm very very excited to be working through that i'm also playing no this is you brought this on though you brought this on now um dragon agent position i'm also playing divinity original sin 2 which is phenomenal uh there's if anyone wants to talk to me about this please come up to me and we will talk about these things because i will literally go on and on and on about all this kind of stuff so yeah yes what's happening tomorrow interaction is rupture uh well first of all if you can get on campus the campus is going to be shut down columbia style um because students are protesting thank god they are um if you need to come to campus and you don't have a columbia id um please email me or i will give you my phone number and somebody will come and meet you at the edge of campus we begin at noon with the gaming panel christine right and then we go all the way through uh to 7 p.m we have the keynote with jules gill peterson so please please please come to trans disruptions it's going to be amazing thank you andres thank you