Cocoon(ing)

fabric, plastic bags, hula hoops, paper, trash

As a human geographer, I am interested in exploring the potential of ‘queer spaces’ to make new kinds of social relations and worlds possible. cocoon(ing) is one iteration of my ongoing conceptual and artistic experimentation with space, subjectivity, and becoming. At the heart of these experiments is a desire to dwell in spaces that support and enable queer modes of embodiment and relationality: unexpected modes of being with ourselves, being with others, and being continually transformed. Such inhabitations might open us up to a world, or they might work to repel and reject a world. Following Lugones and Anzaldúa, cocoon(ing) is at once both movements – a radical retreat that protects us from the oppressive logics of a world and a turning inward that allows us to cultivate and inhabit our own meanings that might give rise to other worlds. Such queer spaces, I imagine, might allow us to glimpse an intimacy unrecognized and unrecognizable through the terms of queerness understood as merely a category of sexuality or gender.

cocoon(ing) is a working through of these desires and queer inhabitations, both a reactive retreat and a creative expression, an attempt to render spaces of becoming and transformation material, inhabitable, and known. It draws inspiration from the mundane but anyway miraculous motifs of metamorphosis alongside a wealth of feminist and queer work that has been undertaken to fashion becoming, transformation, and marginality into an embodied political project. Lugones’ limen – an interstitial space of becoming – and Anzaldúa’s borderlands are two such poetic concepts that speak to the simultaneous dangers and possibilities of occupying yet unrecognized territories of subjectivity and selfhood. I imagine an artistic and philosophical practice through which we might come to create and inhabit these spaces, allowing them to individually and collectively transform us, through which we might come to recognize other spaces and other worlds.