A Library and a Space Odyssey
This month has been rain, state violence, and visual explorations of Yvette Taylor’s book Working Class Queers in the company of three other incredible artists, Rachel Jardine, AJ Duncan and Madeleine Leisk.
We entrenched ourselves in this research. The words, the pasts and presents they gave voices to, and the futures they tried to draw for themselves.
I trace faces from these pages that did not exist. Figures grew from between the lines. From the pauses and punctuation. They walk around and away from me, trailing someone else’s words in the stardust.
I viscerally feel these testimonies. I gently take them apart. They take me apart less delicately. I am pieces to look at. I feel their threads, robust and endless, sew me back together. Running through me in whispers.
I immerse myself in old work, in the words of Black Lesbians who transcend time and space. The same hierarchical violence descends upon us time and again. I am transported to the stars. I turn these words into bricks. To Throw? To build? It remains to be seen…
Queerness travels through time. We do not know where…or when…we are from. I write and rewrite quotes, trying to place them, but they illude me. They are all from now and now slips from my fingers and rolls away. I cannot catch it.
Brushes, black ink and pens translate the words into visions. Queer, we are good at building our own worlds when the systems we a forced to live in are compounded violences out to destroy us.
We will live here. And we will build our islands, connected by midnight channels. Planets terraformed with book-stack landscapes. Our words will travel from the past, deep into the future, starlight queered. Paths and maps and charts to find each other, find our way through. Rage, joy and survival written in the stars.