13/04/2021 | Writer: Kaos GL
When I say “decay is queer” I think of upkeep, the maintenance of a particular aesthic, social position or class as a maintenance of normativity, which I would argue is in line with gentrification tactics—a process of forming complexity into simplicity.
In the scope of the Kaos GL Associations’ Artist Residency Program, Ankara Queer Art, curator and writer Derya Bayraktaroğlu in conversation with an interdisciplinary artist, a poet Alex Turgeon whose works deal with the poetic space of architecture, questioning the built space and language by performing queer thought.
“I define queer as both anti-normative but also as an inability to be, or exist in, normativity. I use the term normative as both associated with heteronormativity, but also how a system homogeneity can be applied to LGBTQIA+ communities. A rejection of normativity that I am articulating isn’t necessarily defined by extremes, though it certainly contains them, it is also an aversion to predetermined roles based on gender and sexuality. When I say “decay is queer” I think of upkeep, the maintenance of a particular aesthic, social position or class as a maintenance of normativity, which I would argue is in line with gentrification tactics—a process of forming complexity into simplicity. An inversion of that ideology seems naturally to extend to the idea of decay, overgrowth, erosion, because it makes complex the nature of an environment. There is something very normative to me about the necessity of maintaining a status quo, or the longevity of a thing, maybe like a building or a neighbourhood. I’m not sure, but to my logic decay offers a kind of romantic return to the beginning, a passive return to the origin of a site (when thinking about a building falling to pieces). That process feels oppositional to world building strategies where things are imposed, and meant to be there and be that way forever. I propose this declaration as a means of undermining late capitalist systems, which have evolved into forms of inclusion cloaked as tactics of normalization. Decay seems like a natural antithesis to that model.”
Click here for the full interview.
Tags: arts and culture
