Starry Earth Bodies: Queer Resistencía Terrenal 

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, 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, and creating sculptures and an installation called Queer Resistencía Terrenal. 

Costume Fabrication + Fittings Documentation:



The intention here was 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.  

The week of December 1st 2023, the SF filming and performances  began. For one week, 8 queer and trans performers came together at the artist residency, Can Serrat, to produce several co-imagined, speculatively fabulated scenes, while wearing the costumes in Montserrat national park.

This film will eventually also form part of an installation, which is currently in progress, called, Queer Resistencía Terrenal. This installation will be comprised of various elements including the film, Starry Earth Bodies, as well as sculptures, texts, costumes, and textiles. As a central aspect of the installation, I am working on creating a landscape of felt and wool mountains, which creates a map using imaginary and queer temporalities and spatialities that attempt to recount and illustrate some of my research experiences moving between and living within rural eco-queer and trans communities in the Iberian Peninsula. I am also working on other sculptural pieces, including a circular braid of multispecies fibers: more-than-human hair, humans, plants, and fungi. I am currently in the process of developing this installation and experimenting with different materials, felting, dyeing, sculpting, and weaving techniques. The intention is that the film, research, and installation serveas an exploration and a call toward other possibilities of living with more-than-human worlds and to learn how to express emotions such as rage, grief, and joy collectively, to arrive at processes of healing and contemplation that will lead to action.

This film is being edited. An installation called, Queer Resistencia Terrenal, comprised of sculptures, texts, costumes, textiles, and a soundtrack are also being produced as well, to house the film when it is completed. If you want to follow any updates please check back here or on instagram: @raesartworld.   

Bed of Peonies,
2022

Video, Performance, Poetry

This video piece breaks down binary understanding of history as good/evil and embrace the spectral web of complexities, encouraging the audience to sew new seeds and grow the gardens to break the old forms and make new kin to move beyond our current ways of knowing and being. “Bed of Peonies” blends footage from experimental performance practices during my period of fieldwork in queer eco-communities along with open-access footage and my own footage that I’ve collected over the years. The focus on and use of flowers in this video also is rooted in my interest in the queerness of flowers and their multiplicities (see “FUCKING PANSIES: Queer Poetics, Plant Reproduction, Plant Poetics, Queer Reproduction” by Caspar Heineann).

Solo Exhibition—
Naturalezxs No Binarixs :
Non-binary Natures,

2021

Film, video, VR, Poetry, Textiles, 2D Art, Performance,  Sculpture

In this exhibition, I brought together a body of work, which included Unearth Me and See Me Wildly Dance, displayed on a TV throughout the exhibition and screened twice for Loop Barcelona, along with my poem, “Unheteroearth”, a textile piece with my poem, “mundxs no binarixs”, a painting, two felt masks, a web VR experience, and three videos: Microbial Land II,  URTH 4050, and This Message is for You. This collection of work encapsulates a large majority of the digital and physical work that I made between 2018 and 2021 and highlights my interests in gender and sexuality, ecology, spirituality, futurity, as well as my multidisciplinary practice. For me, this show, focused around the notion of queer worlding, which further queers Donna Haraway’s definition of worlding as “storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come”. In this exhibition, queer worlding, became a tool, an approach, and a lens for both generating, telling, and listening to queer stories of fact and fiction; one that embraces nonbinary, fluid, and nonnormative modes of existence, connection, and futures. Using queer worlding tactics, these works intended to break down artificial binary classifications such as man/woman, nature/technology, and human/nonhuman to explore the continuum of possible futures and presents that re-imagine gender, sexuality, nature, society, and hierarchies on earth.

Exhibition page
Loop Festival

Interview
Press

Unearth Me and See Me Wildly Dance is a feature-length, collaborative film as well as a poem based in a fantasy queer mythology about monsters, humans, and spirits, primarily by queer and non-binary artists Rae Teitelbaum and Brody Mace-Hopkins. This experimental film acts as a contemporary queer mythology and a reclamation of LGBTQIA+ and other marginalized bodies and experiences and their relationship to ecological worlds, while also embodying the dichotomies, conflicts, violence, grief, and healing processes taking place within and between human and more-than-human worlds regarding current social and environmental issues. The narrative explores this fantasy world comprised primarily of anthropocentric, humanoid creatures, the ‘humans’, the wondrous beasts living symbiotically with the earth, the ‘monsters’, and the ‘spirits’, guardians of all realms, earthly and celestial, and focuses on a future-time-land that harnesses collaborative practices for an earthly survival. Unearth Me and See Me Wildly Dance was an initial exploration into queer worlding, speculative fabulation, and artistic collaboration of worldmaking through film, performance, writing, costume making.

Screened at Bermondsey Project Space, London UK for the The Voices Film Series

Exhibited at SEAS (Socially Engaged Art Salon) in Brighton (2022), and
Espaço 8 Sao Paulo (2023) in Queer/in/g Nature - Part I as part of Fringe! Queer Film and Art Fest.

Exhibited as part of Naturalezxs No Binarixs: Non-binary Nature,
a solo exhibition at Tangent Projects (2021)

Exhibited as Part of Loop Festival (2021)

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Crystal EarthTimes,
2021

VR

Crystal EarthTimes, a VR experience, guides viewers on a journey through 3D crystals and landscapes, a guided meditation, and music by Yialmelic Frequencies as a way to contemplate naturecultures and the non-dualistic nature of crystals, as crystals are located in all aspects of life including at the core of the earth, in the form of solid crystals, as well as in digital technologies such as computers, mobile phones, medical devices, and televisions in the form of liquid crystals, which are devices that can also connect people to virtual nature spaces. This piece was developed during the first lockdown in March 2020 and was conceived of as a way to help people feel deeply connected to nature, in bodily, technological, and virtual ways, for those who were unable/less able to access natural spaces regularly. This piece contains four virtual rooms accessible through portals, which take the viewer to different crystal landscapes. The “Meditation Zone”, includes a guided meditation, which invites the viewer to explore the deep interconnection of the realms of nature and technology as a way to move beyond current binary classifications of life within earth’s ecology. The website is currently not active.

Exhibited as part of Naturalezxs No Binarixs: Non-binary Natures,
solo exhibition at Tangent Projects

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