It is 21:24 on the 20th March. The Sun is crossing the celestial equator. The Spring Equinox is upon us. Blessed Ostara! Day is as long as night. For a moment there is balance. It will return but it will not linger.
In this fleeting present, I am delighted to announce that the Spring Equinox edition of the Grant for Neuroqueering Humans has been awarded to Rebecca Jagoe.
Please take a look at their beautiful work in the following places:
@r_jagoe_
rebeccajagoe.com
sitegallery.org/rebecca-jagoe/
Rebecca expresses a [shared] desire to forgo coherence and rationality, refusing the demand for legibility expressed by the intrusive neuronormative gaze. [understand: we demand to be misunderstood]. Non-rationality is positioned as a rejection of an imperial myth, a method of decomposing the Human. From the putrid remains a monster crawls, dripping with queer, feral eroticism. [bathe with us in the faint new moon light, ecstatic bodies interlocked]. Animal madness becomes a curative potion–may we all drink well on this night of celebration. Spring is now. The time of rebirth approaches.
I am so excited for Rebecca’s journey down the river of linguistic breakdown. Let us Untether with intent! May this offering help you along the way.
About Rebecca, in Rebecca’s words
Writing lies at the core of my practice. Each project I undertake has a core text from which performance, sculpture, textiles, drawing, costume or sound work will emerge. Using nonlinear narrative, my work is a material memoir which examines how my own experiences of illness, madness, and gender are informed by specific Western, Christian narratives around the ‘human’, and human dominion over the earth. Against this I use the figure of the monster, the animal, or other-than-humans to consider other forms of subjectivity and agency. Queer eroticism is interwoven into all of my work, and much of my deconstruction of the human explores the possibility for erotic or sexual encounters with other-than-humans. Madness is not just the subject of my work, madness is the context and position from which I make work. Through my recent writing and object-making, I want to consider how language and objects can be incoherent, non-rational, non-productive acts of refusal.
Right now, incoherence seems the only form of resistance against a system that seeks to rationalise and reduce all beings into parts of a capitalist chain of production, whether those beings are resources or workers or lovers. I hold onto the intrinsic unknowability of the world, and meaning-making as always provisional: language is formed intimately in the landscape, created with and in conversation with other-than-humans, it does not exist a priori or apart from it.
The Grant for Neuroqueering Humans will return for the Summer Solstice. If you would like to be notified when the submission period opens, please Register Your Interest Here.
You will hear more from our incipient network of Neuroqueering Humans soon.
With love and solidarity