The June edition of the Collective Dreaming Club will focus on the theme of queer ecology.
Sharing practical know-how and guiding a workshop of radical imagination in relation to soil and non-human animals will be Iva Davidová and Klára Soukupová. Together with Richard L. Kramár, we will explore how language and poetry can be used to queer normative ideas of nature.
Violets, irises, and pansies have much in common—including queerness. Among other things, queerness draws from the existing sexual diversity of plants, which far exceeds the number of genders normatively recognized in humans. But the figurative link between flower bodies and queer bodies isn’t based solely on mechanical or biological reproduction. It also touches on fundamental notions of what constitutes a human and what constitutes nature. On Wednesday, June 18, we’ll examine why these categories are still commonly separated—and how we might collectively become more aware of the diversity within what is often called the “natural world.”
🌿Javier Areal Vélez: Semiautomático (live)
Argentine experimental music composer, improviser, and curator Javier Areal Vélez will present a live musical performance titled Semiautomático as part of the Club of Deputies program.
This solo production builds on layered generative rhythms and explores the boundaries of looping by integrating independently evolving patterns. Semiautomático brings the logic of Latin American polyrhythms into post-digital soundscapes of noise samples, gritty synths, and ghostly effects.
strlacrecords.bandcamp.com/album/trifasica
🌿Iva Davidová is an artist, educator, and activist. Her work explores militant gentleness and tenderness, interspecies communication, interspecies communism, and radical imagination. She is interested in plant perception, the politics of lawns, relationships with “alien” species, radical gardening, and ecological anxiety. Her artistic practice is rooted primarily in drawing, painting, and object-based media, but she works fluidly—also engaging with photography, raw dialogue, and the written word. She teaches radical imagination at Vesna, is the author and illustrator of Druhá:SmÄ›na, studies in the Video studio at FaVU, and is part of the Unbelievable Dawn project, which participated in Mad Pride and Brno Pride Week. She loves foxes, Pallas’s cats, little ducks, Pipin and Cipin, Rhodiola rosea, clover, and lavender.
🌿Klára Soukupová is a philosopher, gender studies student, and activist. Her research focuses on class-based analysis of animal labor, which she connects to other forms of exploited and invisible labor within capitalism. She understands the oppression of humans and non-humans as deeply interconnected, and her activist practice emphasizes shared struggles and the revolutionary potential that emerges from recognizing mutual entanglement. She is a member of the research project ResisTerra, where she explores rebellious politics across more-than-human worlds, and she is the co-author of A Guide for Young People in Times of a Burning Planet. In her free time, she enjoys baking vegan treats and dreaming of a post-work, loving, and leisurely more-than-human future.