Queer lands: spirit, land art and neo-materialist visions
Olmetti, Simon (2023) Queer lands: spirit, land art and neo-materialist visions. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts.
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This practice-based research focuses on land art, Queer Spirit and neomaterialism to reclaim the land as queer and spiritual, using a multiplicity of media, including photography, sculptural forms, mark making, video and creative writing.
This study proposes entangling neo-materialist principles of key theorists such as Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, with José E. Muñoz’s utopic notions of queerness. Viewed through a neo-materialistic approach, nature becomes vibrant matter, its particles are all constantly affecting one another, always in flux and becoming-with, in constant ‘trans-formation’. Nature is indeed intrinsically queer. At the same time, queering becomes a spiritual process unveiling its inherent makingkin properties, joining every entity, human and more-than-human, in unpredictable multiple and multispecies modalities. Every particle is alive, has agency and it’s in continuous inter- intra- trans- relationships with everything around it.
My process is based upon a multiplicity of voices, sources and materials from different times and contexts, reusing, reclaiming and (re)channelling them through my art practice. In my thesis, I discuss how in the 1960s and 1970s, land artists have proposed a different way of making art with and in nature, including the more spiritual and human-scale approach of Ana Mendieta. I have reused/reclaimed/queered some of their methods, trying for example to apply them to the forest and to some Neopagan sacred sites, using photography, painted rocks and mark making.
I then define Queer Spirit as a spirituality made by and for queer people, tracing its origins, developments and porous borders, together with its contemporary embodiments, particularly among the Radical Faeries and in contemporary art practices. Influenced by authors such as Edward Carpenter, Harry Hay and Arthur Evans, together with Indigenous, Neopagan and eco-feminist beliefs, Queer Spirit is a spirituality closer to and more in tune with nature, its cycles and the land, one that emphasises the joy of life, sex and the celebration of the body. Through a neomaterialist lens, Queer Spirit becomes a process of disrupting heteronormative spiritual dogmas to find new and radical ways of being in nature and with one another, human and more-than-human, a making-kin with matter and all beings.
My final body of work, comprising of five short videos and a large writing piece/poem on walls, represents a sort of physical materialisation of queer land(s), digital videos projected as dreams for utopic alternative being-with/making-kin-with in multiple modalities, to open the land for new queer visions and kinships. Through creative writing and video, land art methods are fused with Queer Spirit and neomaterialism, transforming the land into a utopic spiritual space full of potential new visions and horizons.
Through my practice, I realise a form of queering that can be called camp entanglement, one that fuses spirit, matter and becoming-with, making-kin-with human and more-than-human.
Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment for the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University for the Creative Arts.
Theses on UCARO are made available for non-commercial research purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, content will be protected by copyright and for further use beyond research you will need to seek permission from the rightsholder (for example, author, publisher, artist).
A version of the chapters ‘Land (and) art’ and ‘Spiritual land(s)’ has been published in the article ‘Land, Spirit and Queerness’ in Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol. 16 No. 1 (2023): https://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/673
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