{"id":15702,"date":"2021-07-19T17:03:29","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T17:03:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=15702"},"modified":"2023-01-03T18:02:36","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T18:02:36","slug":"feral-intimacies-part-ii-our-homes-are-inedible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=15702","title":{"rendered":"Feral Intimacies, Part II\u2014our homes are inedible<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Feral Intimacies<\/em><\/a> <\/em>is an online exhibition comprising two newly commissioned digital projects by Super Futures Haunt Qollective (SFHQ) and Jeremiah Barber, created this spring at a critical juncture in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Pivoting their embodied and performance-based practices to digital engagements in order to accommodate the transformed conditions of everyday life, these artists imagine expansive forms of relation across distance and difference\u2014across the mediated spaces of the internet, and through multispecies affinities and solidarities against capitalism, land theft, displacement, and genocide. Their projects move through love, wonder, mourning, and grief as collective and communal acts of fashioning a world that is more just and joyful than the one we inhabit now. They envision human-animal relations and collaborations across multiple scales, from the most personal to the world-historical, and ruminate on the generative possibilities of feral intimacies<\/em>\u2014or forms of connection untamed by heteronormative, colonial, and capitalist structures of family, kinship, and home. The ways of being together that SFHQ and Barber fantastically imagine are not meant to be fully comprehended or captured, but rather can inspire us toward transforming all our relations to be less alienated, damaging, or unsustainable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

our homes are inedible <\/em>is a project by San Francisco\u2013based artist Jeremiah Barber, newly commissioned for Feral Intimacies<\/em> and extending the artist\u2019s ongoing explorations of interspecies collaboration in the past and present. In this intermedia work, Barber speculatively hybridizes San Francisco\u2019s iconic Transamerica Pyramid with a termite mound, to transform it from a site that is synecdoche for global capitalist extraction and city-wide gentrification into a potential nexus of tentative yet tender connection. This project emerges in part from the artist\u2019s efforts to listen and learn from termites. Deemed to be pests in the so-called developed world, termites are actually artists and designers of extraordinary environments capable of supporting life for many generations. They communicate nonverbally through incredible forms of percussive vibration and can mobilize quickly in response to threat or attack. Most importantly\u2014and despite their diminutive stature\u2014termites\u2019 collective labor creates entire worlds that far exceed their individual capacities. Channeling the creative and connective efforts of termites, the windows of Barber\u2019s structure <\/em>reveal fleeting moments of the shared human and termite desire to survive in increasingly hostile living conditions. These windows include buried histories of the city\u2019s former Manilatown and the decades-long fight to save the International Hotel; lessons in termite tapping and Morse code; and communiqu\u00e9s from a loose network of artists and activists across the United States, which serve as a pandemic-era documentation of our being alone, together. our homes are inedible <\/em>makes monumental the life-sustaining labor of communication during crises and is an optimistic endeavor in listening otherwise.1<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Thea Quiray Tagle, Guest Curator<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is an interactive work that can be viewed on a computer\u2019s web browser or a mobile device. On a computer, hover your mouse above each window of the Transamerica Pyramid to view interactive panels. The Volume On\/Off button allows sound during video playback. On a mobile device, tap each window to view the panels, then touch anywhere on the screen to close them.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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