Lichens, Fungi, Fugitives and Hackers

Emma Bigé , Clovis Maillet

Lichens, fungi, fugitives and hackers [[performance trans ∪ transecologies]]

"Let's start with the end of the world, shall we? Let's get this over with and move on to something more interesting." - N. K. Jemisin

"Tiresias took 500 years they say / to turn into a woman / becoming smaller darker and more powerful / before like a nut, falling asleep in a bottle / Tiresias took 500 years to become a woman / so don't despair of your sons." - Audre Lorde

"TRANS is the name of a transition that is not just mine. A systemic transition, from a single binary world to a multitude of multiple worlds." - Léa Rivière

Beings that don't stand still, creatures that are crossed or that pass through barriers that would like to be established once and for all, those that brush up against the graspable and those that decidedly don't want it.

In 1987, the Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa gave these beings the name queers, but also atravesados: those who cross, those who are at home in the in-between or who know what it is to live on one side and then the other of a border (between languages, between nation-states, between living beings). The same year, Sandy Stone wrote her Posttranssexual Manifesto, calling for a multiplication of stories and arts to tell the story of gender transitions: a call to think, outside the paradigm of the mind trapped in a bad body, of sensual, collective and crazy ways of changing destiny.

Crossings/transitions: not corrections, not rectifications, not even necessarily reassignments to the already available categories of the sex-race-gender system, but rather proliferating processes, refusals to be contained.

Following the calls (different and richly instructive) of Gloria Anzaldúa and Sandy Stone, this Think.Zone proposes to think about the way in which human and not-so-human lives are put into crisis by petrosexual capitalism and its ecocides, and to rename the resistances that are invented in its hollows. Trans* studies and the arts, and their intersections with ecology, understood both as activism and as the science of the interdependence of living beings, are a privileged path for this investigation.

"Lichens, mushrooms, fugitives, performers and hackers" will be our portals: figures (real creatures, but also symbols) of the refusal and undermining of categories and clear-cut separations. By renaming them and multiplying them (adding snails, starfish, spiders, mayfield brooks, compost, Ellen and William Craft, Transparent, The Lego Movie, Tirésias, Yve Laris Cohen, François Chaignaud, or Prince), we'll be looking at how the contemporary arts, and performance and dance in particular, are shot through with fugitives and hackers.

keywords :
trans, ecology, arts, dance, performance, interdependence
Guests :
A Livingstone, Jay Jordan et Isabelle Frémeaux

Part of Ecological Emergencies
This Think.Zone is held in English. Course credit is given based on attendance and participation.

textes/oeuvres :

After Mayfield Brooks (credit Malcolm-x Betts) and Saint Theodorx (credit Wien Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, cod. Lat. 326)


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