Ecstatic utopias: reorienting audiovisual evocations of place towards a relational queer future
As people move through the world, affecting and affected by its sights, sounds and smells, we understand our localised experiences as constructing a perception and identity of place. Given its centrality to the human experience, understanding place has preoccupied artists and academics attempting to evoke and explore how we affect and are affected by the world. Artists utilising referential media such as photography and phonography have built up a body of work exploring visual and sonic evocations of place through recorded time. The ER’s theoretical and practice-led research has fed into this, uniquely utilising both photography and phonography as equals and taking advantage of their contrasting temporalities to create transcendent experiences of time and place. In this project, the ER will develop a new theoretical framework integrating queer, political and cultural theory to reorient the evocation of place away from an evocation of place in the past and towards a relational sense of queer futurity. Informed by this framework and utilising the transcendent rhythmic aesthetics of static and moving temporalities in recorded sound and image, the ER will create a portfolio of artworks built out of layers of affected and affective field recordings, photographs and videos to create complex assemblages of place as it exists in the past to produce an affective, emotive imaginary of a relational queer future. Mark Fisher identified the transformative potential of transcendent art to create an imaginary beyond the political context which produced the climate crisis and increasing inequality. In a context of rapid climate change, artistic and theoretical interventions in the way people relate to place and the environment we inhabit are vital. Reorienting this relationship towards the future lays the groundwork for a context in which change progresses society towards a vision of utopia rather than preserving the status quo which produced the situation we find ourselves in.