Keywords: scripting, coalition, climate catastrophe, transgender gesture, autistic
Abstract
Flowing, Patterning and Pacing by MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr) unfolds trans* and autistic gestures informed by our bodyminds in and within climate catastrophe. In this sculpture we unfold sculptural and performative gestures that rehearse survival for trans* and disabled people in changing climatic conditions.
Flowing, Patterning and Pacing by MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr) unfolds trans* and autistic gestures informed by our bodyminds in and within climate catastrophe.
In this work, triangular-wedge wooden structures fit into one another and are built to hold each other, temporarily. This fluorescent pink dry-fit construction reaches about two and a half meters tall and uses no glue or screws to stay together. Pressure and pegs hold the weight through a series of slanted, skewed and queer joints. Flowing, Patterning and Pacing references the garden it sits amidst, Urbane Waldgarten Britz in Berlin, Germany by following similar principles as the ‘growing support structures’ already surrounding young trees nearby. These support structures are positioned around trunks, creating the possibility for them to weather storms and put down grounding roots into this emergent garden. In our work as MELT, we regularly work with triangular shapes like wedges. Wedges can be metaphorical devices as in those wedges that are driven into structures that exclude (MELT 2021) and literal as in those wedges (like doorstoppers) that hold open doors towards other pathways and (wood splitters) that split binary conditions apart. In Flowing, Patterning and Pacing, triangular trans* wedges split apart normative ideas of fixedness and fixing, and hold open multiple strategies of recombination – this fluorescent pink structure withstands, but it’s not fixed, and it can reappear otherwise, determined by different grounds, holding, being held and stepping out.
Held up on this wooden structure is a flowing burlap fabric that extends and shows imaginaries of climate justice futures. Carefully planned, stenciled and painted onto the burlap are images of roots, rocks and sprouts with pathways intended for visitors to embroider into. These images emerge from science fiction stories, such as the autistic main character of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) who packs a survival kit that allows her to grow not only plants but a new community. Visitors are invited to embroider and sit amidst change through autistic strategies that are evident in this burlap weave; by inviting visitors to repeat embroidered gestures already in the weave, and by inviting them to script with us, following plans for flourishing dreamt up by disabled people on the burlap. Through embroidering together over time visitors enact changes and practice growing our futures. In the end this work is an invitation for visitors to pause and consider practices of moving with and preparing for change. Flowing, Patterning and Pacing works with trans* and autistic gestural strategies towards rehearsing our collective coalitional flourishing amidst climate catastrophe.
About The Artists
MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr) builds worlds along three arts-design research structures: Anti-Ableist Technologies, The Meltionary and Zeitgeber. Actioning shape-shifting processes that generate material, aesthetic and infrastructional transformations intersecting Trans* feminism and Disability Justice, their work interweaves themes of: climate change, coalition building, critical technical practice and access. MELT's work resources ways of being together that figure in the present and future our flourishing. MELT shares work in the forms of videos, installations, websites, lectures and workshops. www.meltionary.com
Citation
Britton, Ren Loren and Iz Paehr. 2024. “Flowing, Patterning, and Pacing.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. http://www.tsqnow.online/post/flowing-patterning-and-pacing
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