DEADLINE: SUNDAY 20 JANUARY 2019

Arts Feminism Queer (CUNTemporary) is now accepting proposals for ‘Deep Trash: Eco Trash’ & ‘Queer-feminist Ecocriticism in Live Art & Visual Cultures’, which will be part of the larger programme ‘EcoFutures’, taking place in London, in April 2019.

The programme will explore urgent topics ranging from ecological disasters and their impact on climate refugees; plastic/toxic waste and the contamination of aquatic and human bodies; the relationship between increasing air toxicity and human and animal diseases; high-speed capitalist consumption and the ungovernable production of trash and techno-waste; from neo-colonialist soil exploitations to indigenous land reclamations and green economies; the rise of temperature and sea levels and their direct effects on the environment, with a focus on the Global South / Majority World.

Artists, activists and theorists are invited to engage with these topics through feminist, queer and decolonial approaches to provide alternatives that draw from situated knowledges, eco-sustainable modes of living, non-exploitative human and animal relations within ecosystems, as well as speculative scenarios of imagined futures, nature-based spirituality, earth magick, feminine powers and ecosexuality.

CUNTemporary are calling for:
1. Performances, videos, installations, prints and other 2D/3D and time-based media artworks for the multi-disciplinary exhibition and performance club night ‘Deep Trash: Eco Trash’ on Friday 19 April 2019 at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.
2. Theoretical output and (performative) lectures to be presented during the 1-day conference ‘Queer-feminist Ecocriticism in Live Art & Visual Cultures’ on Saturday 13 April 2019. This will be hosted by the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University and will include contributions by guest speakers Gaia Giuliani (University of Coimbra, Portugal), Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths University, UK) and João Florencio (Exeter University, UK); screenings of works by Adelita Husni-Bey and Wangechi Mutu; with more special guests from Europe and the US to be announced
3. Written contributions (articles, write-ups, interviews, short essays, cross-genre, creative writing…) for an editorial piece to be published online at ...

Your proposal may include, respond to, be affected by, but not restricted to:
● Indigenous and native two-spirited/trans responses to land expropriations and natural destructions.
● Connections between toxic masculinity and ecotoxicology
● Creating sustainable micro-economies against capitalist exploitation/new forms of labour from a gendered perspective.
● Hysteria and Nature: historical representations and contemporary subversions of the association between untamable femininity and environmental disasters.
● Climate change and the impact on the Majority World and the ecosystems: from the rise of water levels to the Sixth Mass extinction of species.
● Projections of monstrosity and alienation: how climate refugees face increasing racism and xenophobia.
● Environmental disasters, alien/monster attacks and post-apocalyptic events wiping out the white, able-bodied, nuclear heteronormative family (and associated values).
● Afrofuturist connections to botanic healing and eco-spirituality.
● Plastic pollution in water and the ecosystems: eco-destructions and creation of new forms of water bodies’ resistance in speculative fiction scenarios.
● Politics of DIY and bio-hacking experimentation: cyborg organisms and non-human to human hybridisation.
● Trash and techno-waste as resources for post-porn activism.
● Transspecies relationality and hybridity: from animal to geological and water alliances.
● How animal sexualities resist normative ideas of sexuality and gender and the perception of ‘natural/deviant’ in human discourses.
● Ecology without nature or ‘dark ecology’: symptoms of ecological catastrophes and dystopic visions of ‘non-human’ worlds and societies.
● Feminist critiques of (m)Anthropocene theories.
● Ecosexuality as a form of resistance to heteronormative relationality and anthropocentrism.
● Critiques and reflections on meat consumption and queer-vegan standpoints.
● Meat, flesh and cannibalism: radical approaches to human and non-human body politics.
● Anarchic and anti-speciesist utopias.
● Transexuality and queer genealogies in plant and animal domains.
● Affective Xenopolitics: anti-systemic struggles for the emergence of new alliances in bio- and ecological territories beyond the rhetoric of (nationalist and other) belonging.
● Eco-rituals ranging from neo-paganism, wicca, green witches, radical faeries, pansexual communities and menstrual magick.
● Shamanism and the practice of curanderas: the power of healing with herbs and channeling supernatural dimensions.
● The impact of colonialism, globalisation and capitalist-industrial development on the ecological demise of the colonised territories and periphery countries.

For more information and to apply to either 'Eco Trash' Live Art Night or ‘Queer-feminist Ecocriticism in Live Art & Visual Cultures’, head to cuntemporary.org