Closer to Nature
Considering our bodies are 70% water, it’s not surprising that everyone is talking about the Bay; sea level rise is a family emergency. Water remembers: it is full of earth’s history, memory, life, the unknown and now the cup’s overflowing. Our oceans make life possible, our planet habitable, and now this body of water is looming in the shape of what will eventually destroy us. Here, too much. Later, not enough. In Miami, we are on the front lines of the climate crisis. Millions of lives and ecosystems are at risk. Sea level rise is accelerating, with levels now reaching 1 inch every 3 years; it took 30 years for the water to rise 6 inches, and now will reach that at twice the speed. While that doesn’t seem like much, there’s a 400% increase in flooding events. A couple hours of rain and everyone is kayaking down the street. A couple days of rain and airports shut down. Biscayne Bay is deteriorating at an alarming rate. Its future is uncertain.
We find ourselves in another Florida climate crisis, as Governor Ron DeSantis works to criminalize queer and trans existence. The argument for erasing us recalls the reasoning of colonizers: it is unnatural, it is perverted, it is ungodly to be gay or trans. He has introduced a slew of bills that intend to erase trans and non-binary people; with the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, making it a felony to provide gender affirming care, criminalizing trans people for using the restroom, allowing healthcare providers to deny patients care, and attacking academic freedom. This is present day genocide. He doesn’t want us to exist or for anyone to know that we can exist, either. Our futures are uncertain.
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Closer to Nature is presented at Deering Estate, the 1920’s era estate of Charles Deering that is now a museum owned by Miami-Dade County. Charles Deering, a wealthy industrialist, preservationist, and philanthropist, championed the arts and invested in environmental discovery. In 1913, Charles Deering began purchasing hundreds of acres of land where the high ground of the Atlantic Rock Ridge and the freshwater of the Everglades meets the Biscayne Bay; in 1916, he purchased the Richmond Inn, the first hotel between Coconut Grove and Key West and in 1922 had the Stone House built, making this his final home. The land that Deering Estate sits on has hosted 10,000 years of nearly continuous human occupation, including Paleo-Indian shelters, Tequesta settlements, Seminole hunting grounds, Bahamian and Florida Cracker homesteads and the town of Cutler. It consists of eight different ecosystems: pine rockland, salt marsh, mangroves, submerged sea grass beds, flow-way, remnant slough, tropical hardwood hammock, and beach dune Chicken Key. It’s the home of the Cutler Fossil Site and a Tequesta Burial Mound, both protected, prehistoric archaeological sites. The Seminole hunting grounds became the grounds of the Seminole wars in the 1830’s, where they fought against their forced removal. Deering’s Stone House was built during a time of intense racial segregation, and many of the workers were Black or Afro-Bahamian. During construction in 1916, an explosion occurred that resulted in four deaths and five injuries.
The land of Deering Estate carries a history of genocide, colonialism, and a snapshot of Florida’s environmental mutation. To present this show here, exhibiting works by queer, trans, and BIPOC artists, about queer experiences of time, science, nature, and spirituality, claims space within the historical lineage of this land.
In Greta Gaard’s essay, Toward a Queer Ecofeminsm, Gaard dissects the contradictions in culturally constructed binaries that were used to justify colonialism, genocide, and enforce hierarchy; in dualisms, human/nature, reason/emotion, mind/spirit, the oppressed groups are always seen in Western culture as “closer to nature”, yet queerness is frequently devalued for being “against nature”. While this implies that nature is valued and protected, these environmental disasters and climate crises demonstrate otherwise.
Trapped in the tension of these unsustainable and inaccurate binaries, whatever cannot fit those definitions becomes invisible or languageless. It takes on a life of its own. It mutates the binary. In 1927, in a letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling”: a sense of eternity, feeling without perceptible limits. When feeling oceanic, one experiences boundlessness. One mystically merges with nature. Escaping the limitations of culturally constructed binaries, queerness is synonymous with oceanic feeling. To encompass beingness without the constrictions of existing within a dualism where there is always a winner and loser. In this space, all is possible.
In Closer to Nature, the exhibiting artists are finding themselves and expanding the environments for queer existence to thrive. Works ranging from sculpture, installation, poetry, performance, artifact, and video sprawl across the Estate’s grounds and in the Great Hall of the Stone House. The media and materials the artists use here, including somatic poetry rituals, spell work, living sculpture, drag, performance art, and ephemeral artifacts challenge tradition, using experimental methods for creating, thinking, writing, and performing. These works observe oppressive structures, embody defiance, and prodive the antidote to their restraints. Looking into the hidden, unseen, impossible, extinct, and unknown, the artists here exemplify what it means to be queer: to give language to a world larger than the one we find ourselves in.
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Considering our bodies are 70% water, it’s not surprising that, when not resistant, our natural state is fluidity. We move, change, grow, take on new shapes. Life happens and we carry the information in our bodies, all of our water sometimes remembering. Queerness holds fluidity; it is a state of being, not yet here. We move, change, grow, take on new shapes, always becoming and becoming again. Our cultural history does not get passed down through bloodline but some other fluid, like time slipping through cracks of knowing.
In Kasem Kydd’s video installation Opecean Wounds: We are Still Alive, Like Hydrogen and Oxygen, they create a meditation, a counternarrative on Blackness, the ocean, sound, and their fascination with drumlines: an amalgamation of translating experiences in the diaspora to sound. Kydd’s image fractures across two screens as they perform lines, repeating them over and over while clips of found footage come in and out, like generations of remembering. Across these clips, and in their performance, Kydd is attempting to locate themself through Black sound, Black movement, reaching into cultural and ancestral memory. Whalers singing while they work, ballroom scenes, coffin dancers, Beyonce performing at Obama’s inauguration. All of this floats within the stream of consciousness. The work’s title, coming from an excerpt in Dionne Brand’s Verso 55 in The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, turns to water and the wounds it carries, what it remembers. Communicating with ancestors across time, Kydd’s work embodies the belief that their ancestors are now a part of the ocean as sand, rock, water, and organic life; that they live on through Kydd in the water they drink.
KUNST’s work HARBINGER 1: FROM A KEYHOLE TO MIAMI, considers the ocean’s presence not for what it holds now but what it may, soon. Their TOWN CRIER dons a blue emergency tarp, adorned with seaweed, crabs, swamp ephemera, standing before the rising waters of Biscayne Bay ringing a bell, like a mirage emerging from the water; this is a warning. This reality of our climate catastrophe is coming, haunting us. The town crier is a symbol of what is already pending, the bell chiming for hours to keep this at the forefront of our minds, reminding us: this water is soon going to swallow us, our streets, our cars, our homes whole.
In the colonization of indigenous cultures and persecution of queers, Christianity has been used by the colonizers as an authorization for their exploitation. In 2023, this rhetoric is being aggressively recycled by the right-wing conservatives like Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green, Mike Pence, and many others who weaponize spirituality as a way to persecute and project deviance onto expressions of sexuality. Divinely inspired domination, as Greta Gaard puts it, is the mission of countries with Christian and colonial origins. The idea of other cultures not exploiting their women, their land, their animals was an outrage; the acceptance of queer behavior and trans identity terrifying. They considered this an opposition to reason. Gaard considers this a fear of their own nature. In the rhetoric of Christian colonialism, the Europeans “civilized” this savage nature by taking native homelands and eliminating their cultural and spiritual practices. Sex was the essence of carnality, and therefore, the antithesis of spirituality. But queerness, feeling oceanic, is limitless, unbounded, mystically & eternally connected.
Harmony Honig (Cara Dodge)’s illustrations reference mythology, spiritual practice, and explore intergenerational memory. Through creatures, with the self as nature and nature anthropomorphized, they blur barriers between who and what we are. In Uriel, they depict figures, arms up in worship or surrender, surrounding a reptile and a beacon. Uriel, the archangel of wisdom, shines light on truth and is sought for help or new information. The figures open themselves, ready to receive. In mother tongue ii, the tongue appears with cuts, dripping with dark fluid. The mother tongue, being our first known language, is poisoned. In these works, Honig searches for truth in the body, healing, and uncovers something mystical, connection with the divine. Also communicating with the divine, X Medianoche casts a spell with BISEXUAL ANGEL. They take language and use it for healing, as their words A divine mystery spoke / said why not join me in this space of loving all? / together our bodies delete embryonic blame echo and repeat like an incantation. The blame they speak of, guilt, shame, projected deviance, becomes poison that our bodies remember and carry. As X hears all the angels sing, they embody openness and become a channel for love. Images parade through, zooming in and out of microcosms and searches for deeper meaning. Ants covering a lollipop, friends dancing, sharing dessert, embracing mystery through the playing of an organ. All of it becomes a source of magic for healing the wounds of patriarchy, limitation; love and openness, a form of defiance.
Healing the wounds of patriarchy, of displacement, of colonialism, means looking in and at which parts of us have been built using their structures. Whether it be the poison in our tongues, our language, our systems for keeping history, the plans of our cities, shapes of our homes. These systems want to dominate, withhold, exclude based on a self-made logic.
CA Conrad’s words, from Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, printed at human scale, remind us how small we are. These poetry landscapes evoke the vastness of earth in comparison to our humanness and what’s of our own design. They seem uncertain if planet earth is even real, if we made it up. They reference the man made alongside the wild. Wardens, parole, calendars, cell phone towers, cameras, museums, light, the sea, lightning, wolves, bison. Between these things, it’s easy to get lost in how much is unknowable, how much wildness has been reshaped by our touch, how much will carry on without us. Conrad delicately sets down how, as time runs out, there is still a desire for our memory to live on in whatever comes next. So wilderness never becomes mythology / we put them / in parks to be / wild on purpose / a museum of fur / fangs and hooves. While Conrad’s poems parse through the manmade amidst the wild, Lee Pivnik’s polypore offers a glimpse of life where the two collaborate. Using branches collected at the Estate, Pivnik’s work explores relationships that evolve between organisms and those we design and build in the natural world. They examine symbiotic communities that grow on the trunks of established trees, and in polypore, they allude to shelf fungi that grow out of wood. On this branch, it becomes the foundation for a network of architectural forms that are stilted and domed. In Miami, much of the architecture goes against nature: it pays no regard for what we know and see happening with the Bay. Lee’s proposed sustainable architecture plans of homes and structures that incorporate nature symbiotically are an offering, a possible future, an alternate timeline. There is no hierarchy here, between human and nature, just fluid evolution.
Gaard discusses how, when nature is feminized and culture is masculinized, the culture-nature relationship becomes one of compulsory heterosexuality. She explains that, in a patriarchal system that conceived of nature as female, there is a clear connection between the development of science as the rational control of a chaotic natural world, and the persecution of women as inherently irrational, erotic, and therefore evil. Colonization can be seen as a relationship of compulsory heterosexuality, where the queer, the erotic, non-westernized people and their culture, their land, is subdued with the conqueror “on top”. In Christy Gasts’s Topology, she explores the erotization of nature. Mimicking Shibari knots, denim limbs wrap around arms of the Poinsettia tree and nature becomes a stand-in for the body. The denim limbs are “dominating”, topping the tree. Shibari, which translates to “to bind”, is rope bondage, but can also be practiced as a form of meditation to create intimacy with a partner, building healthy communication and trust. These knots are used for crafting pleasure, connection, not conquering. The power is equal. The limbs and legs intertwine.
Where Gast’s work shares the eroticism of building an equal partnership with nature, GeoVanna Gonzales offers a realm to imagine and practice connection without hierarchy. GeoVanna Gonzales HOW TO: Oh, Look at Me, creates fluid structure as a way of reprogramming space. The structures, changeable and mutable, embrace multiplicity and facilitate social connection. They can be gathered around, in, used as a stage or a space to share with friends. Here, they have been reconfigured. The staircases meet each other at the ascent, leading to nothing, with the space between them surrounded by the sound of looping poems by Zaina Alsous and Arsimmer McCoy. The stairs mirror themselves like a reflection in the water; ascending only to come back to themselves. As the structures overlook the Bay, the water becomes a conduit to see other versions of yourself. Like the stairs, you too can become more fluid. Reconfiguring and claiming space for those who are bipoc, women, queer, trans and gender nonconforming, HOW TO: Oh, Look at me finds reflections, connection, and a plane to exist in, liberated.
To exist queerly is to live in spaces that do not welcome or acknowledge you. To hold experiences that get lost in time, forgotten. To have memory erased. To understand the world differently than it was presented to you. We are looking for ways to open reality to know us, remember us, to keep us, let us stay.
In The Length of Daylight, Tsohil Bhatia attempts to capture time; sunrise to sunset measures 58,200 inches long. Sitting at a table, drawing a single straight line on paper for the length of daylight, they fall in sync with nature to mark each second. The result, a 4,850 ft. document, presented on a platform in the Great Hall reconfigures that time. Captured chronologically, the length of time now exists here all at once. The paper is not presented linearly but organically, weaving in and out, falling over itself, end and beginning getting lost. This is queer time: hundreds of points meeting everywhere, no discernable start or finish. Dani Janae’s poems, written in response to Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, commissioned by and inscribed on a set of hand tools for The Queer Theory Library, time travel like this too. They respond to history and create something to create something to create something. Janae’s words, let there be evidence I lived here. I won’t disappear / will not be held to an existence on some man’s biographical tongue, are at home on these tools. As the poem comes apart, dissolves, evidence she lived here lives on when the tools are used, either to create or to dismantle. The memory comes in and out, and ways of being remembered come in new ways of being documented. Janae remembers Lorde’s words and whoever checks out the tool kit from the library and uses the hammer holding Janae’s words will remember her, and so on. There is no discernable start nor finish.
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Considering the ocean as a body whose future is uncertain, it’s not surprising that it holds our reflection. The ocean is becoming and becoming again. It is unknown. It is feared. It is finding itself, surviving, reproducing. Boundless. It has no discernable start or finish. Queerness resists definition. It resists empire, limitation, finitude. We are building worlds, experiencing time and space in ways we have not been given language for. When we come to know ourselves, we hold power like water holds memory. When we transition, we become closer to nature. Transition is fluidity, fluidity is being open to mystery, mystery breaks us open to change, change is every second marked on a paper that gets lost in itself. The only way to survive is to remain open to the possibility for more. We live open to questions. I will not close with a conclusion. There is no conclusion. Only an open door to somewhere else.
2023