Queer Ecologies: To Dream a World Alive

Curated by kaitlin bryson for The Holland Project’s 2025 Curator Series

Exhibition Statement:

The minerals building bones in our bodies were metabolized through the slow digestion of ancient lichens and fungi. Our bodies, along with plant bodies, depend on shelled beings who once lived, died, and sank to the ocean’s floor accumulating with other sediment, turning into stone and eventually calcium and phosphate. We know eukaryotic, multicellular life evolved because of an anarchist merging of two completely different species; the uncanny engulfment of free-ranging prokaryotes who decided to live together and optimize their fitness. These are but a few examples of the innumerable intermingling between different species and how their lifestyles queerly confront western colonial myths of the “individual” and separatism, which divorce humans from “nature” and leads to precariously stacked hierarchies of worth.

For centuries, the colonial project has proliferated, practiced, and sanctioned this violent myth to claim power and to protect notions of human exceptionalism and/or white supremacy. Sustaining the logic of separatism requires the narrative be established onto-epistemologically, “empirically”, and practiced daily throughout culture. Thus, the practiced routine of separatism objectifies the living world and normalizes the exploitation of the Earth’s resources and peoples. It normalizes violence on bodies and land for greed, capital, and political gain while propagandizing towards expansion of these perverted pursuits. Yet thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and the present realities of shifting global ecologies and climate systems affirm that the activities of all life implicate, involve, and depend on the activities of others. In other words, all aspects of being and beingness are queer, and explicitly preconditioned by and contingent upon being related and becoming-together.

To contaminate and unlearn fabled colonial myths of separatism and individualism, queer ecologies: to dream a world alive offers an unconventional, multidisciplinary ecosystem of works celebrating the logic of relatedness, co-emergence, adaptation, pluralistic joy, and multispecies wellbeing. The exhibition of artworks –in tandem with educational workshops in queer material and multispecies-world-building, plus artists interviews, and a Gay Sounds radio hour on KWNK– celebrate queer, trans, and BIPOC voices who boldly and beautifully make this world alive. Through photographic and video installation, sound, poetry, and living/decaying materials the exhibition emphasizes how multispecies collaborations not only sustain life, but also emerge as languages, cultures, and adaptive forms of life. 

Featuring artwork by:
Sky Hopinka, Dylan McLaughlin, Emma Ressel, Rachel Bordeleau, Beata Tsosie-Peña, kaitlin bryson, Submergence Collective, Fronteristxs, Luc Biscan-White, Nancy Dewhurst

With workshop by Shanhuan Manton and Artist interview with Emma Ressel on KWNK