Anna Sisson

The Chaos of Queer Time and Space

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“Get rid of meaning. Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you: Now eat your mind.”
— Kathy Acker

Being part of the inescapable reality of culture within normativity, my queer and feminist politics search for a place to rest. Within these theories and away from politics, the possibility to move freely in the fluidity of reality emerge. Thinking through these theoretical fields, I have tried to create a concept and image for a space both inside and outside the mind, enforcing new ways of thinking. Queer space can be imagined and described in many ways by women and LGBTQ intellects. Researching their findings, I have found queer space is to be perceived in moments of strangeness and change. Through further exploration of these fields of theory, I have discovered rigid logics melted into ornate forms, structures that have been altered and painted over to emerge new truths and examples of fluidity that can move between queer and normative space, inspiring the freeing of emotional and mental blocks. 

I returned to the closet to analyse ideas of marginalisation. I found that by pushing back the wall behind the closet, the queer space unfolds, away from heteronormativity. Practising the creation and forming of detailed spaces, the paradise of freedom’s actions emerge behind the closet door. Theory turns to practice of the queer as childish, animalistic and deprecating, leaving the ego to escape objectivity by becoming emotive and untamed. Although this space has labour as meaning is sought from the counter-cultural, family, bodily and societal demands, this new space frees itself with intimacy. The opportunity to be free walks between ideas and away from duality, allowing all to exist simultaneously including the failed, ostracised, fantasy, deluded and emotional ideas. 

Thinking around the queer body the opportunity to become inside, outside dissipates into space. As fluidity continues through my practices, compressed space is expanded, pushing flat surfaces back with depth and enlarging the possibility for new space. Exploring the layers of invisible life that is customly rejected and dismissed. This project is exposing, pushing the limits of queerness into a position to be critiqued, while looking back with a critical eye on the normative; forming tension between the idea of escapism and coming out. Creating a space that has become tough from self-defence, as carer and protector. Implying ideas of survival, defence, retreat, attack and the ever-present enemy. 

 
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