By Martha Summers

Exhibitions, like camps, are typically temporary.  Both are types of place making that use small structures and gestures as a way to conjure up the feeling of more fleshed out spaces.  They create a playful, makeshift and non-normative domesticity, involving miniature and collapsible versions of familiar things- whilst also able to be incredibly purposeful.  Here is, a staking out and building of a space (for each other) with whatever means available. 

In these temporary structures, and the space in between them, intimate spaces are created with very little.  Tents are arranged in circles for safety- we look towards and protect each other in collective camp making. Structures rely on tensions and slackness- the relationships between different things- to turn thin, soft materials, into protective shells. Ropes driven into the earth, and tied around trees.  Camp structures rely on each other. 

‘INTRA - depend on me bby’ thinks about an exhibition as a way of going camping in a space- using what we already have (home comforts), specialist kit (things we need just for this show *and* can take with us to camp in the summer), and things we make on site- inviting active and spontaneous camp-making in the gallery space as part of the install process.  It is an exhibition in a backpack. 

Martha Summers is an architect, artist and leatherworker. Her artistic and architectural practices explore themes of queer domesticity, self-fashioning and butch identity.

Biogal, Party City Pigeon Wings (Wings made from nylon tights and wire with 50+ street found pigeon feathers stitched on):

D Mortimer, Some Body’s Sins But Not Mine, (embossed Tshirt, pull-up bar):

A t-shirt with the text ‘I AM THE LEZ ERECTION’ hangs on a silver pull-up bar, from a community gym in Chicago Marlo has been working out in.

BIO: D Mortimer is a post-disciplinary writer and artist from London. They/she/he also moonlights as a bag designer. Their essays and poetry have been published widely and their debut book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published with Pilot Press in May 2021. In February 2023 Between The Stacks, with Lydia Garnett and Prinx Silver was named an exhibition of the month by Dazed magazine. They are a techne doctoral candidate in trans autofictions at the university of Roehampton.

The work connects to the theme via fashion and nightlife. I made this t-shirt this year for T Boys, Spring edition. Tboys club creates an atmosphere that allows trans boys to be feminine without feeling encumbered by a cis gay crowd. This is also something camp trans shares, the freedom to test the limits of gender expression among people you trust. This work emphasises the play and mutual creativity that is abundant in trans spaces, ‘a fuck around and find out’ methodology that has powered many a sexual revolution and will continue to power those to come. It’s in our trans nature to get reborn, and adorn. 

Elliot Lind, Rory Culkin’s Penis + Poem (oil painting):

Elliot is a painter and writer living in London

Gabriel Kidd, dust hugs the erthe (dyed textiles & collected objects) 

Jordan/Martin Hell (car tire, chainmail), chainmail portraits of Hilma Af Klimt & Angela Simpson:

Jordan/Martin Hell is a Black trans(2s) scholar, writer, & artist. He is the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS & several other novellas & critical texts in the CV multiverse.

Joseph Vince Thomas, Bury me in your favourite hole (changeling, baby):

Josiah Moktar, China Glaze Salsa, (C-type print), 2022:

Josiah Moktar is a portrait artist working with photo and text. She lives and works in London.

Kasra Jalilipour,  Queer Alterations, (digital print):

Queer Alterations is a digital manipulation series, using 19th-century paintings to centre queerness in the artworks from the era. Images are manipulated by placing sexually suggestive images of women together, or swapping genders in sexual acts to create queer sex scenes in these manuscripts.

Léann Herlihy (publication):

PUBLICATION BLURB: a cartography of the middle of nowhere is a charting of spatial ontologies which centre ideals and areas of radical resistance for those who dwell in the margins. Unfolding out into a large-scale map, this publication consists of a speculative text, pragmatic diagrams and an exercise for the reader inside. 

Transgressing beyond the boundaries of language, a cartography of the middle of nowhere becomes a subjective area of geographic desire wherein each individual’s map is informed by autobiographic, mythologic and embodied performances of the self. Written from the perspective of a queer wayfinder, this map is demarcated by leaky boundaries; edges that expand, dilute and shift to accommodate the evolving environment in which queers and queer desires are situated. Rather than being located in the bullseye, the middle of this queer nowhere becomes decentred as it navigates the encroaching peripheries of somewhere. On the run from a dominant society, the middle is unfixed, ephemeral and fleeting.

With this in mind, the mathematical topology of the Möbius strip becomes the middle of nowhere’s floor plan. Chugging like a conveyor belt of navigation, the reader runs the risk of never securing what they desire yet endure the repetitive cycle of collision, collapse and (re)surfacing in a bid to find it.

BIO: Léann Herlihy [they/them] is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin.

Their practice is informed by trans*, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks outputting alternative modalities of expression including live performance, video, billboards, sculpture, text, workshops and radical pedagogies.

Rigorously and creatively critiquing the positioning of Otherness in a heteronormative society, Léann actively transgresses beyond 'Other' as another tick-box option to choose from and moves to explore the generative capacity of collective engagement and resistance when we abolish colonial and capitalist prescriptions of personhood, the body and gender.

Employing a methodology of interdisciplinary collaboration, their practice actively de-centres the author and strives for multiplicity over a single narrative. Through this methodology, time and space become shared communal resources between an array of individuals as the parameters of individualism are resisted through a process of imagining how a collective might begin to live Otherwise.

Magda Onatra (prints): 

Streams, Cabin (installation and performance):

Three friends encounter a cabin in a dream. They build it whilst silently grieving friendships past.  One by one, the cabin lets them in and holds them as they each grieve friendship breakups in their own way.

The cabin is a place to grieve those friends we have lost to life, to silence, to growth, to wrath.  

The cabin holds for us what we can’t hold anymore and are ready to meet.

The cabin knows how to give you a little privacy and quietly witness your grief.

The cabin may respond to you with the echoes of those who have visited before.

If you like you can spend some time inside. You can stay for as long as you need.

kane stonestreet & Lori Lo Bianco - Tugs

Lori is a Sicilian trans-masc multi-disciplinary artist. Lori has a broad practice: they perform as an alter-ego/drag king, they make experimental video essays and produce queer literature events. 

kane stonestreet is a fagdyke and a sculptor. They create performance rituals that explore how drastically disappointing (their / this / all) gender is. 

tugs is a challenge between two lovers and a performative convergence. The duo circle and size each other up. The space between is held by their gaze and filled with their hot breath and the sound of their trailing chain appendages. Thrusting and whipping leads to entanglement and tug of war. What might seem at first to be a struggle for supremacy and control becomes a tender embrace. 

Sweatmother and P.O.T. - Stigmata 

A personal protest, a private prayer,  a public vigil for Trans Day of Remembrance 2022 staged by the group, Pissed off Trannies. 

331 marks: one for each of the 327 trans and gender diverse people reported murdered in 2022; one mark for those whose went unreported; one for those who lived and died in stealth; one for those posthumously misgendered; and a final mark for those who have lost their lives to state violence via suicide.

95% of those reported were Trans Women or Transfem. Half of those murdered whose occupation is known were sex workers. 65% were people of colour. 68% occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean. 36% of the murders in Europe were of Migrants. 29% took place in Brazil.

REST IN US. REST IN PEACE. REST IN POWER.

Filmed and Edited by Sweatmother

Kiara Mohamed Amin - Soft Boys

Dir. Kiara Mohamed

Running time: 15 min

Soft Boys is a short film about queer and trans joy, specifically through and within the Somali culture and community. By re-engaging with Somali traditional dances, cooking practices and garments, Kiara connects with his nomadic ancestors and to a heritage from which he had always been made to feel excluded. Kiara’s work highlights how modern concepts of masculinity can be surprisingly conservative, even within the trans community. The experimental documentary questions what it means to be a man by focusing on emotion, empathy and joy.

Kiara Mohamed is a Somali, queer, trans multidisciplinary artist based in Liverpool, working in photography, filmmaking, poetry, and artisanal handicraft. His work examines the ways we exist alongside one another and our environment, as well as what happens when we readdress our trauma through moments of radical joy. His films champion care and mindfulness and explore how art can allow for transformation, adaptation and healing.

Puer Deorum - The Marking of a New Moon

Creating continuums, cycles of movement and visions, distorted mirrors of earthly patterns. Refracting, retracing, rekindling memories, blurred like the recounting of a lucid dream of which the narrative was dug up from the subconscious mind. Slow but ephemeral like the transition of the sun over the shore disappearing before we know it while we gaze out onto the horizon. An illusion; enticement - the moment we scramble to memorise the moments fire and water were contiguous, entrancing, colours swept over by the darkness, an aftermath of the waves swallowing a star, caressing then absorbing our environments like a crescendo that peaks like a mountain - enigmatic but constantly present, the possibility of a threat to stability (preconceptions) looming, but ever-present. 

Puer Deorum is an artist born and bred in London.

Lou Lou Sainsbury & Gabi Dao - Fowelley’s Scent

Fowelley’s Scent is a gender-bending perfume based on the bodily aroma of Fowelley, a fictitious more-than-human saint that sensuously leaks their past selves.

You are stung by geranium, gentle but piercing an under-the-skin presence. The soft halo of a saint emanates brightly amber citrus, permeated by the headiness of car exhaust with a wreath of sweet marjoram. Fresh and undoubtedly green, but not without beads of sweat and salted ocean air.  A turn of events brings smokey and greasy oakmoss with leather to complicate this tableaux, where lactonic whispers ooze over the dewy skin of soaked dancing bodies, sharing wetness, seeping animal stench. Acidic and desirous. In this conjuring, a small cluster of mushroom spores amongst petals ask:

“Fowelley are you leaking?”

Fowelley’s Scent is a cloud that bites. Just delicious.

Maria Mautino  - Quiltmaking, Saturday 1 - 4 pm

Maria is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on fibre arts. They use second-hand materials to create art installations referencing the myriad of facets of being queer. We will create squares that will come together as an installation that references the 'AIDS Memorial Quilt' and the long queer history of collecting and presenting oral and community histories through handmade craft. 

Participants are encouraged to bring pieces of old items of clothing, accessories or other materials that either represent or come from a part or time of their lives that they are now ready to let go of and symbolise their trans journey. This artwork will be comprised of small pieces of trans history that will bring us together and mark a symbolic moment that we will be able to share together as part of this workshop.

Rosa Marouane - Life Drawing, Saturday 2 pm

After an indeterminate number of years scratching with keratin nails, the girl developed a taste for the metallic.

Now equipped with machine driven needles, calcium-laden plaster, and a pair of haemoglobin-stuffed appendages, she continues to collect, form, and scatter inorganic matter in an attempt to return it to the anti-gestalt it’s always wished to be.

Long live the body that crumbles, and the multitudes it births with every chip, snap, and wretch.

She has been known to curate bookshop basements, numerous human epidermide, and the occasional bedroom wall.

Streams (Matisse Pagès, Nat Li Lin Steinhouse & Yuki Nakayama) - Performance, Saturday 5 pm

The narrative-based movement and sound performance ritualise moments of communion and times of separation.

TISSUE - Poetry Readings, Saturday 7 pm

TISSUE is a reading night dedicated to showcasing both established and emerging trans* and non-binary writers. It foregrounds literary work being produced by trans writers and artists, seeking to explore and understand what it means to be trans in a way that moves beyond the strict expectations of memoir, identity politics, and trauma porn.

Other

Lending Library

Clothing Swap

Zine/ publication market

BBQ, Saturday 1-3 pm, 6-7 pm

Mud wrestling hosted by Lori Mae, Sunday 1 pm

A very important trans tradition resurrected from VFD’s sweaty basements

Panel Discussion, Sunday 3 pm

Mother Mandragora, Salacious in Purple of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence & Jordan/Martin Hell, hosted by Biogal

Filmscreening, Sunday 5 pm

Lou Lou Sainsbury - pollen spools out, words scatter through a waiting room window, 2021.

Live-performance as HD video, 18:05 mins, with Marie Tučková.

Performed at Understory Chant, The Dutch Art Institute & Sonsbeek 20-24, 26 August 2021, Posttheater, Arnhem, Netherlands

In the waiting room, history performs its own waiting. Romance is a bite from an open window, the stench of it burnt her nostrils. Earth is deadnamed. As the stench of geraniums fill the room of a theater, a waiting room is performed onstage and a love scene unfolds between two more-than-human beings ‘Fowelley’ & ‘Gabriel’, in a perpetual coming-of-age that never arrives.

Mining the romantic horror of trans-femininity from the score of Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema classic Vertigo (1958), the performance-for-video troubles real-life experiences of how trans communities share gender affirming care outside of official medical channels into a noxiously desirous play of more-than-human sense, crossings and pollinating intimacy. Featuring a musical performance duet with the artist Marie Tučková, “pollen spools out, words scatter through a waiting room window” is an ecosexual ode to the ways in which our bodies, both human and more-than-human meet and exist for each other in the waiting room. A love scene for friendship in the horror of a shapeshifting yolk.

April Lin 林森 - (Tending) (to) (Ta)

(Tending) (to) (Ta) is a narrative-led speculative fiction film grounding itself in ‘tā’, the monosyllabic sound which in Mandarin Chinese encompasses all third person pronouns: 他 (third person male), 她 (third person female), and 它 (more-than-human lifeforms and objects). As these multiple genders and modes of being are all pronounced ‘tā’, the word ‘ta’ has in recent years been reconfigured and adopted as a gender neutral pronoun in colloquial contexts in Mainland China, in queer spaces and beyond. In the film, Lin casts ‘ta’ as an infinite cosmic entity with a proper noun Ta, who exists across universes and is present in all beings and matter.

The film follows an exchange of internal letters between two protagonists who imagine one another across parallel dimensions. Each communicating to an envisioned other, who exists as a possibility beyond their self-perceived boundaries of reality, these two beings meet in a shared world of imagination. In this reciprocal reach for the unknown, a world that bears an uncanny resemblance to our contemporary reality – colonised by Western capitalist constructs of race, gender and class, and characterised by a collective distance from Ta – opens a portal to another realm.

Here the potentialities of rethinking identity and the coexistence of life forms have long since been expanded. Subjecthood is recognised as fundamentally ever-changing, porous and codependent, and the accelerated rhythms of alienating wage labour are entirely absent. Daily routines stem from the interconnectedness of all beings, and encounters with the surrounding world are choreographed into affectionate, meditative rituals that not only honour these intricate bonds but also strengthen one’s affinity with Ta.

As the two protagonists confide in one another in search of connection and meaning, the boundaries between their two worlds become permeable. The film asks where the boundaries of our understanding and imagination are drawn, how to reach beyond them, and what unforeseen norms, restrictions or modes of governing might wait for us, if we were to leap across to the other side.

Other

Lending Library

Clothing Swap

Zine/ publication market

BBQ, Sunday 12-4 pm