Feral Intimacies, Part I—Super Furs for the Super Futures 77: Beavereavement

Super Futures Haunt Qollective, Curated by Thea Quiray Tagle
Screenshot from animated GIF of black-and-white photos of beaver boxes being parachuted in and various beaver-related headlines over collage of dark, starry night sky and tree-covered hills in background. Small inset film shows some cows surrounding a beaver.

Feral Intimacies 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— across 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—or 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.

For the first installment of this exhibition, SFHQ (whose members include Angie Morrill, F. Sam Jung, and C. Ree) presents the animated zine Super Furs for the Super Futures 77: Beavereavement as a simultaneous gift for the public and a memorial for Leroy Xavier Morrill, a young Klamath man taken prematurely from this realm. The fanzine pays homage to multiple inspirations adored by the trio and their extended kin and grieves the accumulated losses of family members, homelands, and entire lifeworlds. These sources include the late emo rapper LiL PEEP; K-Pop sensation Taeyang and his hit song “눈,코,입 (Eyes, Nose, Lips)”; and, most prominently, hordes of beavers on the rampage all over continental North America. From an initial research interest in the seventy-six beavers relocated by parachute in 1948 by the Idaho Fish and Game Department, SFHQ’s three future ghosts (as the collective’s members identify themselves) make kin with the lost seventy-seventh beaver who did not survive this forced relocation, and all other beavers who refuse to be disappeared by death or dispossession. Scrolling headlines of beaver takeovers of waterways and land grabs through the decades prove that nature is healing; beavers are not only metaphors of resistance but they also embody refusal, resurgence, and regeneration in their individual and collective beings. Yet while beavers are imaginatively resurrected here by SFHQ and find ways of surviving, they ultimately—like all of us living—still die. LiL PEEP and Taeyang are the soundtrack that carries them over. Weaving these disparate sources and binding them together through shared love, SFHQ’s Beavereavement affirms that grieving together is how we take care of our ghosts.

—Thea Quiray Tagle, Guest Curator

Please click the arrows below to scroll through each section of the animated zine.

Super Futures Haunt Qollective (SFHQ) is an art- and research-based collaboration between three avatars: SFAOW (Specularity: Fugitive-Alterity or Whatever), Agent O, and Lady HOW (Haunting or Whatever). In their terrestrial forms, SFHQ’s members are F. Sam Jung (MCP, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a sky person and urban planner in New York; C. Ree (MFA, University of California, Irvine), an artist and film programmer based in California; and Angie Morrill (Klamath Tribes, PhD, University of California, San Diego), a shut-in cat lady who paints pictures for money. She is also the director of the Indian Education Program for the Portland School District.

Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD, is a curator, art writer, and assistant professor of critical ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research and curatorial interests include socially engaged art and site-specific performance, visual cultures of violence, and creative modes of survivance across the Pacific. Her writing has been featured in venues including American Quarterly, ASAP/J, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies,and Hyperallergic.

Credits

All artwork by Super Futures Haunt Qollective. Media sources include:

Section 1, Slide 2 (pages 1–2):

Section 1, Slide 3 (pages 3–4):

Section 1, Slide 4 (pages 5–6):

Section 1, Slide 5 (pages 7–8):

  • Taeyang, “눈,코,입 (Eyes, Nose, Lips),” written by Teddy Park and Taeyang, produced by DEE.P (FUTURE BOUNCE) and Rebecca Johnson (Bekuh BOOM), track 2 on Rise, YG Entertainment, 2014.

Section 2, Slide 2 (pages 13–14):

Section 2, Slide 3 (pages 15–16):

Section 2, Slide 5 (pages 19–20):

Section 3, Slide 3 (pages 25–26):

  • Aline A. Newman, “Beavers in Her Basement,” Highlights for Children, February 1994, 32–33.
  • Lang Elliott, “Beaver Moans,” recorded in Land Between the Lakes, Kentucky, October 15, 2019.

Section 3, Slide 5 (pages 29–30):

Section 3, Slide 6 (pages 31–32):

Section 3, Slide 7 (pages 33–34):