PhD Research:
Queer Worlding: Exploring Practices of Co-creation in Queer and Trans Eco-Communities in Rural Spain and Portugal,
2020-2025
Goldsmiths Student Bio
In-progress work: Starry Earth Bodies
Queer Worlding: Exploring Practices of Co-creation in Queer and Trans Eco-Communities in Rural Spain and Portugal is the working title for my PhD in visual anthropology is located at Goldsmiths, University of London, under the supervision of EJ Gonzalez-Polledo and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón. My PhD research works with embodied, visual, and collaborative methods to engage with the collective experiments in living, kin-making, and worlding taking place in these communities, which I feel are vital survival strategies in this moment of global, ecological crisis. Worlding, here, can be understood as “storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come'' (Haraway, 2016, p. 31). I position queer worlding as a process which can involve social, spiritual, artistic, and ecological practices, imaginaries, and desires that can potentially generate co-created realities centred around safer worlds for marginalized people, embedded in relationships of care between humans and more-than-humans. In my practice, I draw upon queer worlding/SF as well as potentially radical tools for collective and individual imagining and fabricating queer eco-imaginaries, worlds, and future-past-presents.
Over the last two and a half years, I have been developing this research in theoretical, artistic, and embodied ways. During my fieldwork, I spent several months living in and moving between queer and trans eco-communities in rural Spain and Portugal, developing relationships with LGBTQIA+ people who are attempting to create alternative ways of living as an urgent response to climate crisis, socio-political, and economic issues. I participated in community life, practically helping maintain and improve the spaces, attending and co-facilitating gatherings, leading ‘queer worlding’ and performance workshops, taking on leadership roles, conducting interviews, generating fieldnotes, filming, and engaging in artistic collaborations with various community members. The next stage of this project will focus on the organization of this material, which includes both texts and moving images, and produce a body of work, which will include: a collection of handmade costumes; a feature-length film (Starry Earth Bodies); and a written text of around 60,000 words. Throughout this process, I hope to explore how queer worlding practices might help weave together anthropology and contemporary art, in theoretical and practical ways, such as through weaving, felting, sewing, storytelling, performing, reading, writing (ethnographic & poetic), community making, collaborating, and filmmaking.
Over the last two and a half years, I have been developing this research in theoretical, artistic, and embodied ways. During my fieldwork, I spent several months living in and moving between queer and trans eco-communities in rural Spain and Portugal, developing relationships with LGBTQIA+ people who are attempting to create alternative ways of living as an urgent response to climate crisis, socio-political, and economic issues. I participated in community life, practically helping maintain and improve the spaces, attending and co-facilitating gatherings, leading ‘queer worlding’ and performance workshops, taking on leadership roles, conducting interviews, generating fieldnotes, filming, and engaging in artistic collaborations with various community members. The next stage of this project will focus on the organization of this material, which includes both texts and moving images, and produce a body of work, which will include: a collection of handmade costumes; a feature-length film (Starry Earth Bodies); and a written text of around 60,000 words. Throughout this process, I hope to explore how queer worlding practices might help weave together anthropology and contemporary art, in theoretical and practical ways, such as through weaving, felting, sewing, storytelling, performing, reading, writing (ethnographic & poetic), community making, collaborating, and filmmaking.