the space between:

Utopian Methods of Relationality

Preface
We live in times of war.
[] In a recent discussion the skeptical question about arts
potential to change the world came up. I said that I am sure it can,
because it has changed my world in many ways. I remember feeling
polemical as I said that, and I also remember hearing conviction in
my voice. Id like to hear that again. So I want to know what we
can do for each other now. I want to hear words that cut to the
bone. When things get nasty, a sense of urgency prevails.
And everyday the world outside continues as if nothing had
happened.1

I am drawn to the idea of utopianism not as a method of escapism from a violent and
nihilistic socio-political realm, nor as an idealistic reclamation of futurity from the grips of
heteronormativity, but as an absolute necessity of the present. As Ulrike Mller writes, I want
to know what we can do for each other now. And I want to know not only what we can do for our
own communities, but also what we can do for the people who are not always recognizable to
us, those who challenge the boundaries of what is knowable and our perceptions of the world
at large. Communities can often be our salvation, especially as queer people in a society that
constantly seeks to erase or destroy us, but they can also do as much damage as they do
healing. It is always a negotiation of in-group/out-group, of us and those-who-do-notbelong-here. Ultimately, communities only seek to care for their own. And I need to know
that when faced with the ethical dilemma of caring for one another amidst so much violence
and trauma that it is possible to not turn away from each other simply because they do not
always share our ways of being in world or our visions of utopia.

(emphasis mine) Mller, Ulrike. LTTR Issue 5: Positively Nasty, New York, 2006.

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I also remember hearing conviction in my voice. Id like to hear that again. When I attempt to distill
where my conviction stems from, this seemingly unaccountable sense of urgency that
compelled me to write about utopia as it intersects with sociality, I think it is simply my
desire to find a way to continue contending with insurmountable odds. How might we make
unlivable lives bearable? What reprieve can be found from exhaustion? And I mean
exhaustion in its fullest sense, the feeling of waking up already tired, of wondering how to
walk out the front door when everyday the world outside continues as if nothing had happened. That
sense of exhaustion that creeps in when I hear the multitude of micro and macro aggressions
the people I love most experience daily. The ever-present fatigue that always says just let it go.
It is the feeling of being perpetually offended, of swallowed indignation and constant
negotiations. It is picking your battles because there is never enough of you to defend or
justify yourself in any given situation. And it is that sense of helplessness when there just isnt
enough of you to save anyone else, either. So I want to know what we can do for each other now that
offers even a moment of reprieve. I want to know what happens between us when we take that
urgency, and the memories of trauma it springs from, to then be better than were expected
to be.2 I want to know what changes when we are willing to show up for one another, to
collectively find a way to somehow be enough for everyones struggles. And I need to know
that we can do this across community lines, not simply within them. It will not be enough if
we can only fight alongside those we feel a sense of intrinsic affinity with. It will not be
enough to construct insular sanctuaries from the world outside; it has to be a way of relating
differently to one another so that our successes are never predicated on someone elses
failure. It has to be, however ephemeral, instances where we arent leaving each other behind
in order to secure our own viability in society.
And I often feel that I cannot possibly address these questions adequately. That for every
solution I propose there are a thousand complicating factors that impede its unilateral
success. So I am struggling to find a way to incorporate inevitable failure into my
conceptualizations of utopia. A definition that acknowledges that we will not always
contend with one another gracefully, or even adequately, but that our inevitable failures still
produce the possibility of enacting utopian instances between us. In a spoken word piece
Andrea Gibson states: when two violins are placed in a room/ if a chord on one violin is
struck/ the other violin will sound the note/ if this is your definition of hope/ this is for
you.3 I want to know how we can construct instances between us like violins, where our own
desires and visions of utopia serve as a catalyst for anothers. Where we strike a chord between
us, and know that our own ability to make a sound is dependent upon someone else doing so
as well. It is a utopia born from interdependence. But unlike the violins, when faced with each
other we will not always sing the same note. And I want to emphasize the value in that
exchange that something happens when our desires and ghosts are in conversation with one

Gordon, Avery. Something More Powerful Than Skepticism. In Keeping Good Time: Reflections on
Knowledge, Power and People. Paradigm Press, 2004, p. 201.
Andrea Gibson. Say Yes. Accessed: 4/15/13.
<http://www.andreagibson.org/poems>

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another that ultimately produces a utopian space that cannot be fully accounted for in
advance. But this space between us is essential. It is the tumultuous beginnings of relating to
one another differently in the here-and-now that then allows us to do so again in the future.
So I have begun this project in order to assure myself that we are able to relate to one
another less violently. That we can touch the utopian realm when we accept that we are
always indebted to each other for our continued survival, therefore we cannot leave one
another behind and expect to succeed. I know utopia is possible because I feel it between
myself and my chosen family. I feel it when they unquestionably offer every resource they
possess to me, and when we sit on the kitchen floor together in the morning as the dog runs
frantically around with the excitement of being awake and alive with everyone he loves in one
place. I feel it when they chose to love me exactly as I am, with the ghosts and scars that
continue to haunt me. I feel it in our interdependency and in the privilege of coming home
at the end of the day. We produce momentary utopias from that relationality; ephemeral
reprieves from the throes of pathologization, ostracism, and various macro and micro
oppressions that constantly seek to erase or destroy us.
I want to offer a definition of utopia that requires no material fruition and cannot be
located on our temporal or spatial maps. It is not a utopia promised in the future, nor one
that has already occurred and subsequently vanished that we must constantly seek to
reproduce. It is tied to no particular temporality, as it is the moment when multiple
temporalities are in conversation with one another, and it ultimately produces nothing
tangible. A way of envisioning utopia where our actions in the here-and-now are always in
service to a livable future. I see utopia as the momentary instances of a relationality enacted
between one another that moves us out of the oppressive day-to-day order. It is the
ephemeral instant where our ghosts and desires and ways of being may be fully realized
alongside one another, even as they may be unrecognizable to us. A utopia born from the
divergence of desires, where what has been haunting and impeding us can finally converse.
One that is neither a place nor unilaterally good, but rather the turbulent state of
(mis)recognition and contestation that occurs when we attempt to reexamine the ways in
which we relate to each other, as well as our positions in, and desires for, society which will
inevitably differ from one another. It is the continual process of relating to one another
better than we are expected to be in a world that conditions us to leave one another
behind. But if we are to engage in a new method of relationality, it means first developing a
notion of sociality that is predicated on our interdependence. We require one another to
survive, to help bear the weight of violence and oppression, to appear as multi-faceted
beings, and thus to act either individually or collectively. We cannot go in search of utopia
alone.

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Artists Statement
They are a compendium of desires contrasting, contradictory, impacted,
immobilizing.
The desire to become fully visible, to be seen (at last) as one is, to be honest,
to be unmasked.
The desire to hide, to be camouflaged. To be elsewhere. Other. The desire
to impersonate someone else, but that is not other enough. The desire to be
[] not a person, to be done with personhood.
[]The desire to dissolve the self into the world, the desire to reduce the
world to matter, something one can inscribe oneself on, sink into, be
saturated with. The desire to compete with ones own image, to become
image, artifact; art; form
The desire to be stripped down, to be naked, to be concealed, to disappear,
to be only ones skin, to mortify the skin, to petrify the body, to become
fixed, to become dematerialized, a ghost, to become matter only, inorganic
matter, to stop, to die.4

These images are an exercise in de-centering. I wanted to allow myself to be part of a

process of constructing utopias that I did not fully determine, nor necessarily have a place
within, but ones that I still had a responsibility to bring into being. It is an exploration of the
deconstruction of (utopian) space and the (queer) body. An experiment in inscribing oneself
into a material utopia, of attempting to (partially) dissolve the barriers between them. I
wanted to know how spaces become a part of us, how our presence within a space then
permanently alters it. What conversations then occur between the subject, their memories,
and this (utopian) space. A compendium of desires contrasting, contradictory, impacted, immobilizing.
An exercise in enacting ghosts, desires, moments of reprieve. Of the intersections between
melancholia and joy, of what can never be. The space between no place and good place.
I asked several self-identified queer artists to select their own utopia, however they might
conceptualize that a physical place, an object, a memory, another person, a photograph. I
then painted portions of their body to blend into their surroundings and photographed it.
The subjects ultimately determined the location and their position within it, as well as how
much, and which parts, of their bodies were revealed.

Sontag, Susan. Fragments of an Aesthetic of Melancholie. Harpers and Queen. London, Nov. 1986.

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