Twirls and Swirls
Curatatorial Residency at Elastic Arts, (2026)
#curation, #performance, #interview, #zine, #queer
collaboration with:
Elastic Arts
## About
Each evening highlights 1-2 artist/collectives’ work coming from a queer (counter)cultural vector: dragging and genderbending, cruising, sex and kink, humor, power, queer and nightlife community technics, ritual, embodiments, gender pharmacology, liberation, love, vocality/voice.
Modeled loosely after the salon, the evening would consist of a headline performance (30-40 mins), an entr'acte short film screening complementing the artists’ work, and an interview/discussion with the curator. At the end of the four-performance series, I will transcribe and edit the conversation into a zine featuring documentation from the performances and a curatorial essay. I believe that the additions of live discussion and printed matter are a unique complement to Elastic's programming series.
The invited artists center performance, but the media/genre are intentionally diffuse and would include healthy amounts of: live sound/video, computational/analog technomedia. The additional filmic and discussion component represents a programming format distinct from other Elastic series offerings.
Concept:
|| How can I explain what is happening to me? What can I do about my desire for transformation? What can I do about all the years I defined myself as a feminist? What kind of feminist am I today: a feminist hooked on testosterone, or a transgender body hooked on feminism?”
- Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
|| “‘The Wheel’ is the cycle. It’s a process that finally started when I knew who I was and it has been moving through phases ever since. My turning of it is to interact with that history and push towards the future. To continue to weave spells and build a path toward my future.”
- Maya Bouldry-Morrison (Octa Octa) in “Poetic Ritual” interview with Clash Music Magazine
|| “You are never homosexual based on your past, but on your present”
- Gilles Deleuze, the introduction to Guy Hocquenghem, Introduction to Gay Liberation After 1968
Swirls and twirls are movements across social, aesthetic, sensory, biological, sexual, and political fields. They defy figure/ground and organism/environment binaries. A twirl seems to come from within, a swirl from without, but twirls and swirls are torsions that work together and help us to forget the old habits of inside/outside. By framing queerness as activity rather than category, Twirls and Swirls aims to situate performance art as a vital and transformative force that generates more and more possibilities for affirming difference.