the space between: utopian methods of relationality

the space between: Utopian Methods of Relationality

Preface We live in times of war.

[…] In a recent discussion the skeptical question about art’s 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. I’d 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 Müller 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-not-belong-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.

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

k.r.huppert THEM submission

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I also remember hearing conviction in my voice. I’d 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 isn’t 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 we’re 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 everyone’s 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 else’s failure. It has to be, however ephemeral, instances where we aren’t 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 another’s. 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

2 Gordon, Avery. “Something More Powerful Than Skepticism.” In Keeping Good Time: Reflections on

Knowledge, Power and People. Paradigm Press, 2004, p. 201. 3 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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Artist’s 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 one’s 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 one’s 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.

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


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the space between: utopian methods of relationality