Co-Unfolded:
Plants grow up { Arranging by chance: on queer family, artistic practice and pharmakon ​
by Abbra Kotlarczyk & Briony Galligan
​
Briony: I was thinking about lines that I loved from the audio essay we made. I really love the line from Ettael, Plants grow up.
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‘When Me and You are In the Garden’ by Ettael, 2023, audio recording, 1 min. 42 sec., courtesy of Abbra Kotlarczyk.​​
B: I find it both matter of fact and very open. At first I thought, oh the plant is like a child growing up into an adult. But then I was like, no… the plant is ‘growing up’ towards the sun and it made me think about humans as vegetal forms. Arranging by chance feels generative for different reasons, connecting gardening with queer spaces and sex, and also that it’s like parataxis—a literary device placing one thing after the other—so elegantly stated.
​​
Abbra Kotlarczyk and Briony Galligan, Doctored Exposure 012, 2025, multiple exposure digital and analogue photograph, courtesy of the artists.​​
Abbra: I love both of these ideas, but especially Arranging by chance. It feels good for all the reasons you’ve outlined, and it’s funny when I think about this in regards to queer family structures, there’s a way that this is true of kinship networks and relations that run against bio-logical lines, but also in the fact of starting a queer family, having children with same-sex partners and a necessary other, in our case a donor: the arrangement is both by chance and very much organised in an intentional way that hetero-normative reproduction is not, or is not necessarily predicated on the same level of planning.
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‘Some Trees’ by John Ashberry, read by Elio, Briony and Ettael, 2024, audio recording, 2 min. 30 sec., courtesy of the artists.​​
A: I love the tie-in to parataxis here, and of course that it borrows from John Ashberry’s poem Some Trees. It feels sort of rebellious against the traditional dictates of bio-logical inheritance that organises around the family tree, as this hierarchical form, that maps in verticals and horizontals, but not diagonals or digression. It’s playful, which incorporates our mode of engagement with the kids, and the prospect of entering into a space where you and I could also play collaboratively through material art making.
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{
Alpha gamma delta beta
Alpha male
Alpha female
Alpha they / Alpha them
Alpha mal / Ani mal
Animism
Aleph, The
Aleph (a point in space that contains all other points).
​
{
For the Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist Etel Adnan, the organising principle of her book-length poem, From A to Z, was a response to the breadth of life and death when thinking about nuclear war, specifically in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in Philadelphia in 1979. The letters A through to Z become a temporal and spatial apparatus; they organise life and death into a continuum, but also into a structural logic to rile against, to undo.
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B: It’s beautiful and an order to push against too. It reminds me of maybe a work you shared with the alphabet made from sticks? It also seemed absurd and then not at all, an accident where ‘stickiness’ and the tree is always in language, or always a way to think through.
{
Spanish writer, philosopher and curator Paul B. Preciado imagines viral, embodied, collective experiences to ask who we are connected to or disconnected from. [1] There is this heartbreaking quote by the American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, talking about visiting New Mexico and living with AIDS:
“I couldn’t buy the con of nature’s beauty; all I could see was death. The rest of my life is being unwound and seen through a frame of death. And my anger is more about this culture’s refusal to deal with mortality. My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.” [2]
Nature is constructed as this con, but more than that, a diseased culture requires nature to be beautiful. You and I have been working alone, together and sometimes alongside our kids and asking how our experiences of illness and queer family connect to earlier queer practices. Contracting AIDS for Wojnarowicz was to be pushed against the edges of where society includes and excludes. Is living in and with queer family living with and through contagion? Is contagion being at an edge of what this society, this ‘world’ is?
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A: The ‘con’ of nature needing to be beautiful to counter a diseased society. At the same time, that diseased society further annihilates this beauty. That the early definition of homosexuality was a ‘crime against nature—that led to queers reclaiming and inflating this sentiment through the lens of ‘camp’—feels important to dwell on…what is ‘natural’? What is ‘unnatural’? Is disease natural? Everything on earth derives from the earth, hence it is all natural? There are certainly many crimes against nature occurring, and it’s laughable and highly distracting to consider queer and trans people being the ones committing them.
{
The second essay we’ve been producing for our exhibition at Bundoora Homestead—Arranging by chance—uses the abecedarian in a similar way to Adnan, to think through the spectrum of life and death, queer family and contagion, toxicity and healing. It’s been a way to structure the conversations we’ve been having by theme, to disrupt the sense of an original logic of chronology, of temporal linearity. In it we situate our research alongside daily observations of caring for our kids in places that are fraught, complex and oftentimes unsafe. It feels akin to how the sites we’ve been engaging with—the decommissioned Nufarm Factory in Fawkner where I live, my childhood property (an ex-banana plantation) in Northern NSW, and the AIDS Memorial Garden outside the old Infectious Diseases Hospital in Fairfield—are shifty and never fixed, always troubled and yet paving corridors to the possible.
For this piece, I thought it could be interesting to shift form again, but still reflect on these questions of chance and arrangement when it comes to navigating an artistic practice with and around caring for children. Something we spoke about in the first audio essay resonates again here, and that is: how do the demands of raising children and maintaining artistic practice become forces both entering into coalition, but also continually vying for our attention? It’s been really generative to work through this in a way that welcomes slippage and fragmentation, in arranging elements spatially and temporally, as these various demands require—dipping in to write at strange hours of the day, often in ways that are fleeting, disrupted, disjointed.
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B: Yes, we work alone, then in relation to each other, to our families, to the sites, forming affinities as we go, as we also reach disconnections and after-dead ends. The land of the sites we have been working with changes too. It is used differently now, but always shifting within these environments. We’ve been talking a lot about the form of the essay. Essays with arguments feel like urban planning, putting words to use, making plants perform, managing them, rather than tending to their unwieldiness. This is something to resist. I remember being told off by a neighbour for picking flowers: “they are there for everyone to enjoy.” The violence and possibilities for being named and organised and then the way plants, animals and people slip away from these forms of arrangement, always outgrow them, can't be picked. Maybe the arrangement of ‘family’ too is always beyond its bounds.
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A: Irish author Brian Dillon discusses the essayist's love of lists, in, to quote: “the essay's paratactic habit of simply setting things alongside each other and inviting the reader to make connections. This is the method adopted by [Walter] Benjamin in his Arcades Project, [3] which his friend [Theodor W.] Adorno found so objectionably undialectical: ‘the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.’ The essay, which in essence wants to wander, may pursue its adventure by the paradoxical means of an ordered stasis: all its elements arranged as if in a cabinet of curiosities, an elaborate microcosm that freezes in an image some version of the world outside the collection. In this essayistic Wunderkammer, things are allowed to be themselves alone, but will inevitably enter into metaphoric relations with each other, essaying lines of analogy or affinity.” [4]
This idea of the cabinet of curiosities also in relation to Carl Linnaeus [5] and broader histories (the present tense?) of how queer and trans sovereignty is cordoned off and contained and gawked at in this manner. This sits in tension with self-described Chicana, tejana, working-class, dyke-feminist poet, writer-theorist Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of identity [6] as river, as climate, as uncontainable; a reclaiming of the imposed relationship between queer bodies and the organising of the world through the naming of flora and fauna, namely via Latin and Greek—enter philology, the phylogenetic, the family tree, now mortared down to a liquid substance, saturated and shifting and dy(e)ing.
Abbra Kotlarczyk and Briony Galligan, Doctored Exposure 020, 2025, multiple exposure digital and analogue photograph, courtesy of the artists.​​
B: We started thinking about the family tree and the essay together, but these forms haven’t just wandered, they are dissolving. [7] We have been working in liquid states, toxic and vegetal forms, potions, exposure to light, the alphabet, writing itself.​​
{
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A: Today I was thinking about how the quote/unquote ‘job’ of the artist is to cultivate enchantment with the material and affective worlds, and how this is (or should be) the primary preoccupation of the child, too.
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The poet Ariana Reines says that all technology is made for the purposes of communication. This point feels important to consider here, as we slip into the dangerous territory of AI psychosis, techno capitalism, feudalism, futurism. It also feels important to zoom out and regain perspective on what ‘technology’ actually is: a relatively new word within the English world, entering into usage as a highly abstract term in application during the 19th and early 20th centuries, but originating in ancient Greece as tékhnÄ“ (‘art, skill and craft’) + -logia (‘words, dialogue’).
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Making art whilst raising children is, regardless of all the challenges, about being in dialogue: with each other, with history and the built environments, which is to say, with the material, affective and dia-logic worlds. Tapping into the ways in which children see these worlds is an invitation for artists (who are really just adult children!) and the reverse is also true. It’s the practice of getting down on your knees and leveling with the kids, seeing them eye to eye; it’s about being curious about their worlds and welcoming them into yours. My friend Ender BaÅŸkan writes beautifully about this in his poem ‘Low Theory/Goodnight Gorilla’:
daddy sit
daddy sit
we go eye to eye
nose to nose
smile to smile
sophies parents used to call her and alex
the floor people
we ought to be a floor family
floor poets
floor friends
floor society [8]
Abbra Kotlarczyk and Briony Galligan, Doctored Exposure 061, 2025, multiple exposure digital and analogue photograph, courtesy of the artists.​​
I showed Ettael how the blue colour of the violet dye turns a bright apple green the second the washing soda mixes in, and they were like “oh cool” but kind of not that interested. I’ve been so excited watching the natural colours shift and cross-react because it feels like a kind of magic, like alchemy. It’s a similar transmogrification with what happens to your perception when writing poems, when you take in utilitarian language, chew it up and spit it out reconstituted, as enchantment. But it’s interesting that for an eight-year-old, this doesn’t seem that exciting, and maybe it’s because magic is kind of built into their world, whereas for us it feels like we get to enter another world that is free (mostly!) of dishes and drop offs and demands for more snacks?
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B: It’s interesting about Ettael’s reaction here, I can totally see that, maybe there’s so many moments where children think “oh cool.” I picked up E from daycare last week and he ran up to me, “Mama I have treasure.” He handed me a small piece of black plastic, perhaps from a hose, or a piece of pipe. I asked, “what is it?” “It’s part of a dead whale that’s breaking apart.”
{
…from the East End
to the West
the trains
are falling
apart
like
Marilyn Monroe
used to. [9]
{
I wonder too, if we save too much of our magic for art, and then our everyday is less surprising? I don’t think children are saving up their magic. Do we somehow believe as adults that magic is a finite resource there for extraction? Are we conditioned so that everything precious can be extracted and everything precious will be used up and never replenished? Elio has recently been picking up sticks and saying they’re for his ‘art exhibition’. That feels sad to me, they’re not fishing rods, or wands, or fire or water, or monster’s fingers, or the spine of Icarus’ wings.
{
We had another sleepless night last night. An old work of mine that I made in uni, a large transparent tunnel I made with hula hoops has joined the blankets and pillows in E’s nest. Halfway through the night he got out of bed and hopped into his nest, tangled in hula hoops and discoloured tule. It was a prolonged return to bed. When Etel Adnan was talking about her A to Z book of poems, ‘I’ stood for In/Somnia. She describes: “I come to life at night. You know, night is like fog, the landscape changes, you are not in the same place.” [10] Last night we were giraffes in a pen with a pillow for water. We are also always in exactly the same place. Exhaustion occasionally amplifies magic, but often sucks it completely dry.
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A: This is so gorgeous, the delirium of night and the giraffes. Sleep deprivation is a very real and accumulative form of torture, but here it becomes an opportunity to frame the experience through another lens: the reconfigured art props that rearrange our relationships to each other, and to the architecture of the everyday. It’s so interesting watching children reinterpret the objects we metabolise into our work, or adapting our excess materials to prop up their imaginative worlds. Also that at different ages, the same objects can enable very different modes of relationship formation. I can see how Elio mimicking you putting sticks into an exhibition setting would feel sad, but maybe it’s a way of him getting closer to your world, trying it on? Today my kids reactivated a couple of tree branches from my Incinerator install that I repurposed into staffs for their Halloween costumes last year. They took the sticks (formerly art, previously trees) and reimagined them as beacons of power for their role play game. I think the imaginative potential is contingent on so many factors, but the exciting point is that it kind of never ends. Here we are in our forties imagining sticks as snakes, as books of spells, burning them and drawing their remains into new visions!
{
It’s an interesting question you ask, whether we save too much of our magic for art. It’s no coincidence that I took up writing poetry in a serious way when Ettael was born; the immediacy and velocity of language as a form of everyday play (and magic) is something that having a baby, a toddler, a child, has crystalised entirely for me. Poetry is a primary mode of engagement; language play seeps into every (potential) aspect of our daily lives in ways that allow us to see the magic in the mundane. A game of ‘thumb war’ becomes a new game called ‘thumb thaw’: our thumbs are newly imagined as 46,000-year-old Siberian roundworms emerging from the permafrost that is melting due to climate change. Or being stuck in traffic on the way to kinder and school becomes an occasion to imagine our car as a submarine as we spot various sea creatures along the way: a Jim’s Cleaning trailer is a prawn, a sweeper of the sea floor; we spot taxi fish and blue angel fish; we see red sock eye salmon swimming upstream to deposit their eggs; a car with a colourful towel draped out its window is a peacock mantis shrimp; a giant blue truck is a humpback whale.
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Art making does feel more separate or reserved by the nature of its labour, its material conditions. Like the way you say it’s so hard to compartmentalise artmaking with parenting; installing artworks in spatial and temporal settings where kids are still (mostly) not accommodated for. Still, there are so many ways to integrate parenting and artmaking, particularly within processes of material gathering and experimentation, especially when you work at home like we do so that the dining room table becomes an extension of the studio, the garden is the studio, the laundry, the shed etc. And they’re beautiful modes of engagement, but yes it does feel like we need to facilitate the grounds for this magic to occur, that it’s not built into the everyday in quite the same ways. Is magic finite? I don’t think it is, but I understand that we might treat it as such, how we might feel we need to extract it, or manufacture the conditions for its appearance, if nothing else so that we can be reminded of its existence.
{
Many scholars and scientists are now saying that the most likely future scenario is the near complete collapse of our human civilisation due to rapidly accelerating climate change. In previous times of civilisational collapse, groups like the Mayans had the ability to save themselves by moving location, into the forest for example. The predicament we now face is that nowhere is safe, and so no one is immune; no one is exempt; we have nowhere else to go; we’re all in the acceleration together (though differently, based on factors of access, privilege etc). And I’m thinking about the magic that we’re currently encountering as the wreckage—not in it, but because of it. I’m hesitant to frame it in this way, for fear of fetishising the ruination, but I do think it’s a particular mode of magical witnessing, and in turn thinking. In that we’re watching such a rapid transformation of planetary systems occur has this powerful ability to locate us in a deeper reference to evolutionary time and place. It’s a dark time, which has a profound capacity to bring us to life, via our grief. Maybe we’re in the fog that Etel describes: “the landscape changes, you are not in the same place.” And yes, you’re so right that exhaustion can amplify magic, and then it can devour it entirely.
{
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B: French Algerian theorist Jacques Derrida outlines the idea of pharmakon—theorised by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato—as linked to writing and conjured as ambiguous and threatening. Derrida suggests that writing repeats and produces effects in the body and has been treated as suspicious and corrupted since before Plato.
​
The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in extending Derrida’s work on pharmakon, is concerned with turning a poison into a remedy; he sees pharmakon as useful. He writes: “The term tool refers to an object, but the term pharmakon refers to a relationship.” [11] For Stiegler, a hammer is a tool, but in the hands of a craftsperson who uses it day-in-day-out, it becomes “pharmakon...he feels the hammer in his hand and ‘can’t help but be transformed.'” [12] For us it seems interesting that artworks can do something ambiguous, but they also change or arrange things differently too, much like the remediation work along the Merri Creek.
{
A: Tracing the origins of ‘technology’ to Ancient Greek, we find the suffix -logia to be highly important to what technology actually means: a tool or skill certainly, but specifically the utterance and discussion of the application of that tool or skill. Technology is about the relationship of applied craft to discussions of its use value within a social context. It’s interesting to note that Plato considered tékhnÄ“ to be dangerous in its virtues, while other philosophers such as Aristotle believed it to be virtuous precisely because of its use of natural materials.
​
Abbra Kotlarczyk and Briony Galligan, Doctored Exposure 053, 2025, multiple exposure digital and analogue photograph, courtesy of the artists​​
I think about the ways in which I use a hammer and a bowl to grind down charcoal pigment and rice glue and water, or violet petals and honey and alum; it’s about communicating with the worlds around me, as well as with the hammer—its material, its history, its agency. In my hands, is the hammer tool or pharmakon? The hammer is an extension and hence integration of my thinking and creating body, my arm, like the hectocolytus is for the Day Octopus. [13] It’s the life-making appendage (life and art being inseparable); it’s the syringe I used to bridge the bio-logic in the making of my babies. The syringe as pharmakon: a tool, a relationship used to heal; to poison; to invade; to administer the substances desired to escape this reality; used to aid the symbiosis of the human body with the biota in and of which it lives—both chemical and “natural”?
In handling these materials I’m not only in conversation with the tree, the rice, the flower, the bee, the octopus, the pharmaceutical industry, the sperm, but I’m also communicating with the worlds of the child in the sense of…I’m getting down on my knees, I’m inviting audiences encountering the work to do the same. How do these technologies, these relationships, enable conversations about parenting, about the role of art making, about raising children in healthy relation with a dying planet?
{
Is it dyeing or dying? You text it both ways and I think of all the ways in which we’re both dyeing and dying all the time.
{
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B: Derrida has these materially rich descriptions of pharmakon as a liquid, sperm, colour, drug without substance and perfume without odour. I have begun imagining the plant dyes you’ve been making and the chemical emulsions on the surface of the film we use as pharmakon. I licked the slide film and wound its tongue into the other roll, to pull out the other film tab.
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A: I began the day with the taste of metal in my throat, and I’m ending it with the taste of film emulsion on my tongue.
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B: We begin the re-exposure again, again.
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Exposure: to illness, contagion, bacteria, to harm or the elements. Exposure becomes a way that bodies, material, light, bacteria, the atmosphere connect (or is it disrupt) what happens internally, exposure also implies ‘enclosure’, that supposedly containable units of the family, the body, one’s identity, one’s history are sealed in some way.
Abbra Kotlarczyk and Briony Galligan, Doctored Exposure 050, 2025, multiple exposure digital and analogue photograph, courtesy of the artists.​​
At the moment, Elio is attaching everything to my Mum’s dog Lily’s leash. He clips books to it, me, a toy monkey, a pillow, his blanket, chairs, the table, himself, parts of the car. "Be a dog Mumma," E says, playing out who has control, who leads who, who follows or is really leading, when to be a dog and when to be a human.
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Ronald has a
spittoon
the lagoon
has the moon
between its
legs
playing ball. [14]
Stiegler positions the transitional object, articulated by British child psychotherapist D.J. Winnicott, as the first pharmakon. According to Winnicott, the transitional object is a phenomena that exists in the world—like a teddy bear or a baby’s babbling—and occupies a transitional space, between the “state of being merged with the mother” to being in relation to the mother as “something outside and separate.” [15] This transitional space becomes play for children, and then extends socially to the realm of cultural production. Stiegler is immensely critical of how technics and industry ‘liquidate’ every form of knowledge, standardising locally specific knowledges and tools. This conception of pharmakon with a reduced transitional space could also be how technologies and industrial healthcare systems are pharmacological processes that mediate possibilities for navigating (and limiting) individuation and collective political potential.
A: My thinking goes to Elio’s plastic whale breaking apart as a transitional object: the transitions of a petro-chemical-induced rise and demise; of pre-historic sea creatures and how the light is trapped away from the deep abyss of the ocean; of fossil fuels as ancient sunlight trapped in plants and animals through photosynthesis, transitioning once more as the recycled guts of consumer products that our children reimagine at childcare. Also, of Elio’s sticks as ‘art exhibition’, extending the realm of play to the social world of cultural production, trying on all the ways he can make the leap to mother, away from mother (earth, parent, tree, whale, industry).
{
The leash is a motif that appears throughout American poet Rosie Stockton’s recent collection Fuel—a collection about desire and extraction. ‘Leash’ sits slippery against the word ‘lease’—to property the hold on someone, something, one’s own lease on life?
“release a bound gazing leashed down lease deranged to feed the garden.” [16]
B: Pharmakon, it’s hazy for me, I have a sense of it being fugitive and slippery.
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A: Pharmakon is both a remedy and a poison, not a remedy and not a poison. Pharmakon is non-binary; a they/them?
{
The Buddha is dancing
in the Whitney Museum
and the moon is bored. [17]
​
B: American author and academic Jack Halberstam argues that western philosophy and colonisation set up the idea of quote/unquote ‘world’. This is established in reference to Heidegger: animals are poor in ‘world’; ‘world’ is the capacity for reflection and the ability to feel bored. [18] This makes me reflect on the ‘funny’ old school conservatism of my dad who used to say things to me like “only boring people get bored.” Maybe he meant “you are bored because you are human” or did he mean “you should be more like an animal and then you wouldn’t feel bored” or did he mean “being human is about the capacity to deal with one’s boredom.” Or did he mean that because I was a child I was closer to being an animal, and that meant I could not accept or fruitfully use my boredom? Did he think animals were boring? Or did he mean that I was now in the ‘world’ both bored and boring?
E regularly tells me he is bored now. Then he finds something to do. Cuts bay leaves off with scissors, takes a shit in the garden pretending to be our cat, makes potions and builds whales from train sets. Recently he growls like a tiger when he is really angry and says “I’m a tiger” and then when he is calm and I call him a tiger, he says, “I’m not an animal, I’m a human.” Is this the dawn of the ‘world’? Its messages received so strong and so young, received from ‘world’ and from us too?
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A: Yes! It is the quote/unquote ‘world’ that makes us boring, I think! Namely the tipping point of supersaturation we've reached into what Paul B. Preciado calls “digital heroin” [19]—first we were addicted to text, now we're addicted to technology (in its limited, English-world conception). I think being in this world is often tedious but that we're maybe not afforded a certain type of boredom; we are expected to consume mediated distraction against boredom. Boredom feels like an extinct species in many ways, and so I think it's a bridge: between distraction and connection. Then there's the other view, like your dad's which I think holds a lot of truth: that lacking an internal world makes us boring and in turn bored. Are we right in also saying that the bored world is decidedly the ‘first’ world that Halberstam clarifies is this ‘world’, as distinct from the “lateral solidarities” of third worlding? [20]
I don't really remember being bored as a kid (no doubt I was); I remember talking to the trees, the rocks, the moss; walking around the forest kicking my feet through bamboo husks, pretending I was a news broadcaster (the natural habitat of a news broadcaster?!) In this, a fervent ability to monologue internally, all the time taking in the worlds around me.
I think animals are too busy surviving to be bored. Like Hannah Arendt’s notion of the animal laborans. [21] Boredom as a privilege? A condition of the privileged class, reserved for those who don't have to spend all their energies keeping themselves and their kin alive; boredom as a lack of struggle? Maybe we need to foster this rare species, this boredom, with an awareness of its potential dangers that reside in privilege, also.
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B: I think about this concept of ‘world’ with children. The inculcation into systems of control, punishment, capital, that shape us collectively. Is this the ‘world’ I bring Elio into? What would it actually require for this to unworld?
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Unworld, God of Google and the plague... I say I hate compliance and then I want it from everything I touch—from my body, from the materials we are working with, at many moments from my child. An order of control I can test, manipulate, predict, repeat.
​​
A:
Test manipulate predict repeat.
{
Our lady of compliance
of taxonomy
of quote/unquote ‘world’
of boredom
of privilege
of finite magic
of fossil-fueled pipelines
of whales breaking apart/running hot/ramming boats
of discipline and punishment
of genocide
of carceral logic running like blood conforming to the page in verticals and horizontals
of order and ruin and dredge
of limitation and demise.
Rearrange our non-conforming desires,
our they/them, our suns of the possible otherwise,
Have mercy on us.
​
B:
Our lady of hysteria
of family trees
of a toxic hybrid from nowhere
of picking flowers secretly and crushing them in your hand
of identifying weeds
of being named after a flower
of being called a flower as an insult
of wilting and collapse
of photographing flowers instead of your anus
of drawing family flowers instead of trees
of toxic weeds named after flowers
of collapse instead of photographing
of family from weeds wilting.
​
Rearrange our after death,
our love, our sun,
Have mercy on us. [22]
​
Endnotes:
[1] Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025.
[2] David Wojnarowicz, ‘Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell’, New York, October 1989 for Witnesses: Against our Vanishing at Artists Space. This text was redistributed by Artists Space in 2010 via their email list after Wojnarowicz’s work A Fire in My Belly (1986–87) was censored from an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, after significant Republican political pressure.
[3] I was reminded of the term 'convolutes’—a label the German-Jewish philosopher and theorist Walter Benjamin used for the alphabetical organisation of content in his Arcades Project—which has been described as a tree-like structure. I'm struck by the name 'convolutes' (translating to 'convoluted') and to this tension of order and chaos, also to chance. Arcades also as a succession of contiguous arches supporting a sequence of columns, mimicking the formation of trees and their canopy, the canopy itself providing a crucial role in the protection of ecosystems; a succession of individual branches and leaves working together to care for the whole (tree, forest etc.).
[4] Brian Dillon, Essayism, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.
[5] Jack Halberstam speaks of Carl Linnaeus’s work in defining the sexual function of plants, and how this gave rise to the ordering, in turn, of sexual deviancy, wherein homosexual relations became deeply entrenched as a crime against nature. Future Ecologies Presents: Back to Earth - Queer Currents, a Serpentine Gallery Podcast, October 8th 2020, https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/back-to-earth-queer-currents
[6] Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘‘T0(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, Escritora y Chicana’ Version Written in 1990’
in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, eds. Ana Louise Keating, Walter D. Mignolo, Irene Silverblatt,
and Sonia Saldívar-Hull, 163–75, Duke University Press, 2009.
[7] I have been reading more about hysteria. The ancient Greeks thought that the womb wandered around the body as a kind of restless animal. The only way it could be fixed in position was with a husband and then anchored down with a baby. With endometriosis, the uterus does wander around the body. In my case it wandered through my ovaries, into my uterus walls, out of the uterus entirely, around my bladder and bowel. In our work, the tree and the essay are hysterical forms, unanchored, liquid.
[8] Ender BaÅŸkan, ‘Low Theory/Goodnight Gorilla’, unpublished, 2024.
[9] Etel Adnan, ‘d’ in From A to Z, The Post-Apollo Press, 1982.
[10] Hans Ulrich Obrist + Etel Adnan: From A-Z, HENI Talks, YouTube, April 15, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g0Erpq8uac
[11] Bernard Stiegler in Felix Heidenreich and Florian Weber-Stein, eds., ‘Bernard Stiegler: Elements of Pharmacology, An Interview with Felix Heidenreich and Florian Weber-Stein’, in The Politics of Digital Pharmacology, Exploring the Craft of Collective Care, transcript Verlag, 2022. Interview conducted in 2020.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Tonight the kids and I watched a documentary on octopuses. The Day Octopus is colour blind. The Day Octopus can camouflage its colour, texture and shape within a split second by stretching or contracting its colour-changing cells, called chromatophores. The Day Octopus senses its environment through its skin, through the detection of light. The Day Octopus strikes me as highly autistic, masking continually to survive. The Day Octopus inseminates its partner with sperm sacs, using a special arm called a hectocotylus: hecto- from the Greek hekatón (‘hundred’) and kótulos (‘small cup’). The Day Octopus is a queer creature, making babies with its special arm (syringe). Our Lady of the Day Octopus, shape shifting as it dyes; adapting to the conditions of the dying, bleaching reef.
[14] Etel Adnan, ‘e’ in From A to Z.
[15] Stiegler states that the transitional object is a pharmakon because mother and child both depend on it to sooth the baby; it provides ‘sovereignty’ interpreted as autonomy and independence, a sense of interiority as well as a socialised space, and the “feeling that life is worth living.” Stiegler draws on ideas of ‘health’ as living in ‘disadjustment’ and in ‘creativity’ beyond the ‘norms of life’. Bernard Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology trans. Daniel Ross, Polity Press, 2013. First published in French as Ce quit fait que la vie vaut peine d’être vécue, Flammarion, 2010. See also D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, Brunner Routledge, 1992, (Originally published in 1971, based on a hypothesis from 1951 and then two publications from 1953 and 1958).
[16] Rosie Stockton, Fuel, Nightboat Books, 2025.
[17] Etel Adnan, ‘p’ in From A to Z.
[18] Jack Halberstam, Unworlding and Q&A at Queer Earth and Liquid Matters, Serpentine, YouTube, May 23, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tshNSOjd5aY
[19] Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi.
[20] Jack Halberstam, Unworlding.
[21] ‘Animal laborans’ is a term used by Hannah Arendt to characterise the biological and repetitive nature of labour applied by the human species towards its own survival. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second ed. The University of Chicago Press, 1958.
[22] The parts of Dysphoria Mundi that stick with me, the bits that keep me awake, are also the funeral prayers: Our Lady of Bubonic Plague…Our Lady of Spanish Flu...Our Lady of AIDS...Our Lady of SARS…You who remind us that we are not alone and that we are mortal, Have mercy on us. It’s such a vivid image of prayer. And the utterances listing the illnesses and pandemics, exposures and corporations who profited during COVID, the drugs and the placebos, the diagnoses and dysphoria. These prayers appear extensively throughout Preciado’s book.