Nominee Master Research Award 2020
The crisis is ongoing, layered and sticky. And it isn’t coherent. Neither is this text. Shorelines form, shorelines disintegrate. What began as dissatisfaction with current vocabularies regarding identity and a hunger for more meaningful ways of accounting for the complicated nature of our bodies and experiences would be subjected to further complication through a crisis after crisis after crisis. Trying to account for the complexities of bodies otherwise unaccounted for, bodies queered by the crisis, bodies deemed invisible, dispensable or ungrievable, bodies confronted with the very real material conditions of a world not built for their survival, [REDACTED] shorelines is a shattered text taking the time to grieve and elegise the experiences of these bodies when there is no time to be taken.
A collection of short texts, poems, essays and letters washing up like a message in a bottle, it has been gradually written at different shorelines of experience, while being battered and shaped by ongoing waves of crisis. These waves continue to arrive, already here as climate crisis, queered political states of the present, pandemic isolations and global antiblackness. This text is a rambling document of work done with friends (some close, some strangers) in making and sharing knowledge during such moments of crisis. This work is underscored by a pedagogy of intimate connections – connections most delicate but worth holding onto in whatever form remains – and a practice of providing mindful tools and activities for sense-making, world-making, listening and responding in the space between one another.
This work also believes in writing as a form of pedagogy and hopes that you might bear witness to this. It is an elegy for bodies seemingly slipping from this world and slipping from our grasp and understanding. What does crisis do to our bodies and how do we retell our stories accordingly? And what do we want from each other after retelling our stories?
View here the full project
