Porous Personhood

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
- Angela Davis, 2014.

Our current society is failing us. Spatial design is infused with bias. How can we abolish the cis-heteronormative system that continues to subjugate anyone who is queer, woman, non-white, or Other?

‘Non-Normative Worlds’ sees “queering” as an approach that unifies once marginalised peoples. Through a practice of queering, we challenge the systems that we once took for granted – our societal norms. The event brings together spatial practices that intentionally critique, dismantle, and disrupt these norms to build new worlds. These worlds are not merely speculative, they exist in the present as dreams of a new, collective future.

Taking a deliberately radical stance, the intention of the ‘Non-Normative Worlds’ collaborative event is to explore alternative forms of spatial practice. This event takes on an experimental format of seminar-workshop where presentations are spontaneously opened up to responses and improvised co-creation. It is a brave space to become inventive. We can share in our familiar strangeness and build a dialogue that is accessible and inclusive for everyone.

“We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds… Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world .”
- José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Organised by Madeleine Griffiths and Doreen Bernath.

My presentation explored how to work in a porous way: where to work collaboratively is to work with and into life, touching and being touched by experience and encounter; allowing oneself to be porous. I discussed how, in filmic terms, this necessitates a deliberately hybrid and layered form.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7CC2Nmb...