Queer(y)ing Creative Practice: Making Kin

Image: ‘Cthulu’ from the Black Box Experiment by QueerTechIO, 2018 https://skfb.ly/6AVvU

Invitation to the inaugural gathering of Queer(y)ing Creative Practice: Making Kin

WHEN:  Thursday 6 September 2018 3:00pm – 5:30pm

  • 3:00pm: screening of film – Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival

  • 4:30pm: wine and conversation 

  • You are welcome to come to either the screening, discussion or both

WHERE: RMIT 080.01.002 

QCP is an informal collective of RMIT artist academics, students, and interested affiliates with an interest in queer creative practices. We propose to come together about once a month to consider and reflect on interesting topics.

Beyond the mainstreaming of issues such as marriage equality, queer cultural practices investigate the arbitrary construction of cultural paradigms, driven by an intersectional approach to social justice and embodied lived experience. Queer cultural practices go #beyondyes to generate reparative actions by gently holding together alliances of practice, ideology, politics and experience.

Queerness is a slippery field that resists definition. More than an alternative term for sexual and gender diversity, Queer is a shifting coalition of political and cultural positions and strategies that critique, defy and ignore arbitrary normativity. Queer cultural practices have been deployed to interrogate the cultural construction of gender, race and disability. In the 21st century, queer cultural practices are turning increasing towards new materialism and posthumanism to interrogate the agency of things and the culturally constituted hierarchies of objects and subjects, positioning the artist as ‘a thing amongst things’.

For our first gathering, we will be reflecting on the theme of MAKING KIN! We will screen Donna Haraway : Story telling for earthly survival, a gorgeous 2016 documentary film by Fabrizio Terranova about the mother of posthumanism and cyborg goddess, the great Donna Haraway.

“Donna Haraway : Story telling for earthly survival features feminist thinker Donna Haraway in a playful and engaging exploration of her life, influences, and ideas. Best-known for her ground breaking work on gender, cyborgs, animals, and post-colonialism, Haraway is a passionate and discursive storyteller. The film is structured around a series of discussions on subjects including capitalism and the environment, science fiction as philosophy, the role of Catholicism in her upbringing, and the need for new post-colonial and post-patriarchal narratives.” https://earthlysurvival.org/

Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita at UCLA History of Consciousness program. Her hugely influential 1991 essay the Cyborg Manifestois considered to be one of the founding texts of post-humanism. In 2017 she was ranked #3 in the ArtReview Power 100 List. And there is a character based on her in the 2004 anime film ‘Ghost in the Shell 2′.

 

If you want to brush up on your Haraway reading, check out:

“One of the most urgent tasks that we mortal critters have is making kin, not babies. This making kin, both with and among other humans and not humans, should happen in an enduring fashion that can sustain through generations. I propose making kin nongenealogically, which will be an absolute need for the eleven-plus billion humans by the end of this century—and is already terribly important. I’m interested in taking care of the earth in a way that makes multispecies environmental justice the means and not just the goal. So I think of making kin as a way of being really, truly prochild—making babies rare and precious—as opposed to the crazy pronatalist but actually antichild world in which we live. It’s making present the powers of mortal critters on earth in resistance to the anthropocene and capitalocene.

FUTURE THEMES:

  • Reparative Practices
  • Contemporary Camp
  • The Queer Art of Failure
  • Queer Technology
  • Intersections: queerness & disability

The Queer(y)ing Creative Practice is presented by CAST and coordinated by Dr Alison Bennett, RMIT School of Art alison.bennett@rmit.edu.au