Queer ecologies. Naturally subversive aberrations

Espacio 0. Centre d’Art La Panera

Annie Sprinkle y Beth Stephens, O.R.G.I.A, Brigitte Baptiste, Liu Xi, Ona Bros, Karim Boumjimar, La Erreria (House of Bent), Joël Harder, Guiu Gimeno Bardis, Roger Bernat, Eva Chettle, Graham Bell, Alba García i Allué, Projecte Úter, Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Alex Francés, Eulalia Valldosera, MITO Collective, Aina Mestre, Neus Solà y Marta Garcia Cardellach, Elsa Casanova Sampé.

The unnatural homosexual, the inverted lesbian, the degenerate bisexual, the grotesque transexual… These figurations show that there is an institutional, scientific, and political relationship between sexuality and nature. A relationship that determines our ways of feeling, thinking, and acting. This is the starting point of “Queer ecologies”, a group exhibition that questions the supposed moral neutrality of heterosexist discourses constructed around ideas of sexuality and nature and reconsiders the relationships between species and environmental politics from the queer perspective. This vision states that the destruction of the planet cannot be separated from gender, sexual, and racial violence.

If ecology was originally understood as a feeling of conserving a natural world that had deteriorated through industrialization, or as a technocratic politics of environmental restoration that ignores the responsibility of capitalism, today it is understood as an ethical and critical practice that constructs multispecies relationships based on the well-being. If the word “queer” was initially used to refer in a disparaging way to the attraction between members of the same sex, today it is reclaimed as a way of resisting heteronormativity and of questioning the fixation of identity categories (lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, etc.).

Queer ecology defines a symbiotic, trans-specific, post-anthropological, and anti-essentialist sensibility, and to a politics of hybridization, mutation, coevolution and solidarity between damaged bodies and ecosystems. Inspired by the biological exuberance of matter, this perspective shows us how to be less human and more bodies in constant friction with other bodies. Questioning the romanticization of nature and the capitalist exploitation of LGBTI+, queer ecology appropriates the discourses of unnaturalness that are used to oppress dissident bodies and puts into practice new ways of dealing with, understanding, and relating to the sexualized, racialized, naturalized, and enabled other.

Collaborators: Morera. Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Lleida, Colors de Ponent, Biblioteca de Lletres de la Universitat de Lleida, Museu de Lleida.