Starry Earth Bodies,
Ongoing Project
Film, Performance, Poetry, Research, Textile
Starry Earth Bodies is a feature-length film, in progress, connected to my PhD in visual Anthropology located at Goldsmiths, University of London, currently titled, Queer Worlding: Exploring Practices of Co-creation in Queer and Trans Eco-Communities in Rural Spain and Portugal. Read more about my PhD here. Starry Earth Bodies proposes to combine documentary and ethnographic approaches to filmmaking with a queer, transfeminist, and decolonial framework, to capture the what is, or what is already taking place in the queer and trans eco-communities I have been working with, with the what could be. For the what could be, I am creating a collection of costumes and weaving textiles using primarily using both raw wool that I am handwashing and hand-dying along with processed plant and animal fibers, found organic materials (ie;
wood, stones, plants, fungi, kombucha scoby, and found feathers and bone) and rope, fabric, chain, chicken wire, and bells.
Costume Fabrication + Fittings Documentation:
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The intention is to develop a collection of biodegradable, recycled, and/or recyclable costume pieces, to be worn by queer and trans performers for the speculatively fabulated scenes of the film. Through practices of worlding/SF, poetry, scriptwriting, weaving, costume-making, film, and performance, Starry Earth Bodies aims to illuminate a multiplicity of queer and trans eco-worlds that are, could have been, and could or will be.
This project considers the importance of visibilizing and celebrating queer and trans people’s existence, coming together, and co-creating community and projects in rural spaces, especially as an alternative to the urban as a point of meeting, gathering, and connecting. Additionally, the film asks questions about how to return to one’s own ancestral knowledges and roots by both bloodline and kinship kind (queer and trans ancestors); it asks us to consider the relationships our ancestors had with working with the land and their contact with the more-than-human-world. In this project, I aim to acknowledge the knowledge, labor, histories, lands, and stories of indigenous and marginalized people, whose voices have only very recently and very sparingly begun to be illuminated, yet remain people and communities who have been historically invisibilized, silenced, erased, violated, attacked, made homeless, and killed. Therefore, the film uses language like future-past-present as a way of thinking through the need to go both backwards (towards ways of living and being with the more-than-human-realms of our ancestral kin/oddkin) as well as forwards, simultaneously. Poetic writings and materials like raw wool with highly processed and brightly colored, dyed wool and synthetic fabric have formed the basis of my current language to describe this backwards-forwards movement in queer time/space.
wood, stones, plants, fungi, kombucha scoby, and found feathers and bone) and rope, fabric, chain, chicken wire, and bells.
Costume Fabrication + Fittings Documentation:
The intention is to develop a collection of biodegradable, recycled, and/or recyclable costume pieces, to be worn by queer and trans performers for the speculatively fabulated scenes of the film. Through practices of worlding/SF, poetry, scriptwriting, weaving, costume-making, film, and performance, Starry Earth Bodies aims to illuminate a multiplicity of queer and trans eco-worlds that are, could have been, and could or will be.
This project considers the importance of visibilizing and celebrating queer and trans people’s existence, coming together, and co-creating community and projects in rural spaces, especially as an alternative to the urban as a point of meeting, gathering, and connecting. Additionally, the film asks questions about how to return to one’s own ancestral knowledges and roots by both bloodline and kinship kind (queer and trans ancestors); it asks us to consider the relationships our ancestors had with working with the land and their contact with the more-than-human-world. In this project, I aim to acknowledge the knowledge, labor, histories, lands, and stories of indigenous and marginalized people, whose voices have only very recently and very sparingly begun to be illuminated, yet remain people and communities who have been historically invisibilized, silenced, erased, violated, attacked, made homeless, and killed. Therefore, the film uses language like future-past-present as a way of thinking through the need to go both backwards (towards ways of living and being with the more-than-human-realms of our ancestral kin/oddkin) as well as forwards, simultaneously. Poetic writings and materials like raw wool with highly processed and brightly colored, dyed wool and synthetic fabric have formed the basis of my current language to describe this backwards-forwards movement in queer time/space.
Project News
The week of December 1st, the SF filming and performances will begin. For one week, 8 queer and trans performers will come together at the artist residency, Can Serrat, to produce several co-imagined, speculatively fabulated scenes, while wearing the costumes in Montserrat national park. Stills from
“Our Earthly Queer and Trans Kinship Song”
“Our Earthly Queer and Trans Kinship Song”