Calling anyone in London this coming weekend and looking for something brilliantly different to do.
The Serpentine Gallery, in conjunction with Stone Nest (formerly iconic London nightclub The Limelight), and Queercircle, presents
BACK TO EARTH LIVE PRESENTS: QUEER EARTH AND LIQUID MATTERS
This is a two-day festival on Sat 16th and Sun 17th July at Stone Nest, bringing together artists, writers, filmmakers, sound and architecture practitioners to explore transformation, queerness, the natural, the unnatural and the wild, as well as decolonial, Indigenous and submerged perspectives on the climate crisis.
Queer Earth and Liquid Matters is curated by Jack Halberstam, Macarena Gómez-Barris and Kostas Stasinopoulos. The programme will feature talks, performances, film, and more from a stellar list of participants including Xavi Aguirre, Seba Calfuqueo, Adham Faramawy, Ash Fure, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Jacob V Joyce and Rudy Loewe, Jack Halberstam, Victoria Hunt, Bhanu Kapil, Juan Francisco Salazar, P. Staff, Bones Tan Jones, and multidisciplinary dance theatre company Wringing Metamorphosis.
Highlighting voices and experiences of the climate emergency, Queer Earth and Liquid Matters aims to unearth the binaries of Western knowledge often encountered in the environmental discourse. More specifically, the programme will shed light on land and water struggles, foregrounding queer and trans-Indigenous embodiment in the Global South and around the world. It will explore apocalyptic visions and experiences and amplify Indigenous refusal and outrage at the consequences of extractive capitalism.
Event schedule Saturday 16 July, 2 - 8 pm, at Stone Nest
Bones Tan Jones
will present an operatic performance inspired by Glaucus atlanticus, the hermaphroditic blue sea dragons that float on oceanic currents, and their changing lives in the face of rising sea temperatures.
Macarena Gómez-Barris will present Sur in Tension. This talk will begin with Ursula Le Guin’s short story Sur, which rewrites the chronicles of male colonial exploration in the Global South. While Le Guin inverts gender tropes, Sur retains a focus on normative ways of describing the geography, invoking the colonial gaze, and erasing Indigenous presences and absences in the Deep South. Gómez-Barris will focus on decolonizing modes of thinking through queer South/South Indigenous relations. She will describe art and cultural practices that derange Western logics of seafaring, forms of being, and planetary dystopia. Gómez- Barris will turn to the rivers, ice, fluidity, and sea edges as South/South cosmologies, analyzing queer Indigenous Mapuche and Maori performance art.
Juan Francisco Salazar will present Nightfall on Gaia, a speculative documentary that depicts the lives and visions of human communities living transiently in the Antarctic Peninsula. Grounded in the artist’s ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Antarctica between 2011 and 2014, the film will be an experimental meditation on the future of the Antarctic as a newly extreme frontier for human habitation, exposing the complexities of a fragile planet at the verge of ecological collapse, our relationship to the ice and the uncertain future of the region.
Seba Calfuqueo will approach the vision and sound of a waterfall through the body in a newly commissioned performance, Flowing like waterfalls. Using kaskawillas, a Mapuche instrument made of bronze, Calfuqueo will imitate the sound of falling water. The performance will draw on the Mapuche story of Copihue and Llancalahuen, two native plants that grew intertwined near humid areas of the native forest. Narrated as incarnations of Mapuche bodies killed by the colonial process, these plants embody resistance. Flowing like waterfalls will approach the power of water’s fluidity as a means to explore the body, gender, sexuality and the relationship between water and life, forests and ecosystems.
Sunday 17 July, 11am – 6pm, at Stone Nest
A Performance and reading by poet and writer Bhanu Kapil in collaboration with multidisciplinary dance theatre company Wringing Metamorphosis.
Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with artists Seba Calfuqueo and Adham Faramawy.
Jack Haberstam 
will present Unworldling, a talk examining experiments in art, literature and architecture unbuilding and bewildering rather than developing and enlightening. Unworldling will explore a different language for engaging with nature – one that recognizes that what is wild stands alone from human desires to classify and contain. The wild, almost by definition, is what lies beyond, outside and around the human. It cannot become part of the human, nor can it be captured by the human, but it can be registered as present through a series of aesthetic, political, and scientific gestures that confirm its presence. Wildness, in this talk, and by extension, nature, inheres to entropy, gravity, the random, the accidental, the unpredictable, the violent and the uncertain.
Jack Halberstam in conversation with architectural designer Xavi Aguirre.
Ash Fure will present Interior Listening Protocol, a participatory listening score developed to recuperate liveness and spatially dynamic, embodied listening back into our increasingly technology-saturated moment.
Adham Faramawy will present Daughters of the River, a new performance that includes dance, sound and spoken word. Drawing on history, mythology and fiction, Faramawy will tell stories of the romances and toxicities of rivers and waterways.
Kostas Stasinopoulos, Associate Curator, Live Programmes at Serpentine, said: “We are thrilled to present Queer Earth and Liquid Matters, an ambitious programme curated with a sense of responsibility and care for our current moment. The programme is dedicated to connecting and relating to each other, and explores ways of being that have often been overshadowed in Western environmental discourse. It brings together different voices and experiences of the climate emergency from around the world, in the hope of creating more connections in the present and inspiring new ways of coming together in the future. I am so grateful to co-curators Macarena Gómez-Barris and Jack Halberstam for their dedication to this programme, to all the artists for accepting our invitation to participate and to our partners, Stone Nest and Queercircle, for embracing the ideas with a unique sense of collaboration”.
Stone Nest, 136 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 5EZ Saturday 16 July, 2 - 8pm,
and Sunday 17 July 2022, 11am - 6pm
Review: Ris Fatah Queerguru’s Contributing Editor Ris Fatah is a successful fashion/luxury business consultant (when he can be bothered) who divides and wastes his time between London and Ibiza. He is a lover of all things queer, feminist, and human rights in general. @ris.fatah
Labels: 2022, Back To Earth, London, Ris Fatah, Serpentine Galley, Stone Nest
