‘Might be going to’ is an ongoing project that uses queer feminist Sci-Fi / speculative fiction as imaginative starting points for research and making.
Speculative-science fiction is an important tool in the queer feminist project; imagining new futures, how we might get there, examining the pitfalls and challenging the past. It provides opportunities to critique the hierarchies of the times it is written in; to encounter post-genderism and ideas of collectivism, to challenge heteronormativity and patriarchal assumptions.
This page documents some of the research and visual outcomes.
Work is being made in the spirit of ‘what if?’ and with the desire to queer a time that is yet to come.
Blanket for The Futureless & A Carrier Bag of Stars for Futureless at SomoS,
Blanket for The Futureless
crocheted leftover fabrics with photocopied fragments from ‘We Who Are About To...’ by Joanna Russ, 2020, H150-178cm x W104cm
Created for and exhibited in Futureless, a group exhibition at SomoS, Berlin. The piece is inspired by ‘A Carrier Bag of Fiction’ by Ursula K Le Guin and ‘We Who Are About To...’ by Joanna Russ. Photographed with a human curled up underneath to highlight ideas around comfort and protection in a futureless world, the piece was originally draped on the wall to ‘net’ and ‘reflect’ back the stories and atmosphere of the show.
A Carrier Bag of Stars
crocheted leftover fabrics (and whatever we can carry with us into a queer-feminist future…), 2020, H96 x W54 x D10 cm
Created for and exhibited in Futureless, a group exhibition at SomoS, Berlin. The piece is inspired by ‘A Carrier Bag of Fiction’ by Ursula K Le Guin and ‘We Who Are About to’ by Joanna Russ. Created as a companion piece to Blanket for The Futureless, visitors to the exhibition were invited to add text, notes, drawings, contributions for an imagined, hoped for queer feminist future. Documented here with contributions, pencils and the texts that inspired the work.
Research, notes and sketches for Blanket for The Futureless
Research, notes and sketches for A Carrier Bag of Stars
'She'll have to go home and feed her cat (multi-world problems)'
“She’ll have to go home and feed her cat (multi-world problems)”
silicon carbide on black & white fold-out zine-poster, 2018, A5/A3
All text in this piece is from the work of Joanna Russ, particularly from the works The Female Man and When it Changed. The piece was shown as part of the Feminist Library’s Summer Exhibition: Archiving the Feminist Experience. All work shown was made in response to the collection and archives held by the Library. Joanna Russ is an American feminist Sci Fi writer whose work can be found in the Feminist Library. This publication is part of a larger self-initiated project using queer feminist speculative-science fiction as its starting point called Might be going to, inspired by Ursular K. Le Guin’s book Always Coming Home. The fold-out publication uses collaged fragments, text, shadows and glitches to imagine a future-past.
when it changed (maybe), might be going to & later we got better (sort of)
Reading queer-feminist science fiction; thinking of different worlds, what might be left of an imagined future-pasts and how they might have emerged.
when it changed (maybe), might be going to & later we got better (sort of)
ripstop banner in greyscale with white fringing, duck-tape, bamboo canes, cable ties, bendy foam & metallic pink stretchy PVC, 2018, W100cm X H200cm x 3
Shown as part of Future Heroine a group exhibition at Raw Labs and at the Feminist Library’s Summer Exhibition Archiving the Feminist Experience. The work developed from a body of research inspired by queer feminist scifi texts, in particular Margaret Atwaood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and it’s final ‘historical notes’, which re-presents and comments on the story from the perspective of a lecture from an even more distant future than the main body of the book. The outcomes are an attempt at inventing what might be left of an imagined future-past and how they might have emerged through protest, story telling and desire.
Girl Gang: future-past
Girl Gang: future-past
Folded black & white publication with grey spray paint, 2018, A5/A3
A zine from the imagined future past, with appropriated text from feminist scifi writer Joanna Russ and the fragments of Sappho, combined with borrowed imagery from Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames and objects from ancient European goddess cults.
Reading List
“A desire to queer a time regarded as still to come and to work in the spirit of - ‘what if?’”
Research publication experiments
Might be going to - research residency, Kingston School of Art Research Space, Croydon Art Store
Starting points
Ursular K Le Guin’s ‘Always Coming Home’, a book that sets out a philosophy and culture of a society of people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now”.
The final section of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ called ‘historical notes’, which re-presents and comments on the story from the perspective of an historical lecture from an even more distant future than the main body of the book.
Joanna Russ’s parallel worlds, gender slippage and alternative narratives of history within ‘The Female Man’
With these influences of queer-feminist speculative fiction / science fiction & utopian / dystopian worlds in mind, and in the words of Le Guin, I want to research, and in researching, generate a kind of “archeology of the future”. Unlike ‘The Handmaid’s Tale, the proposition is a positive one.
It will use the appropriation and manipulation of ancient, historical and contemporary feminist sources as starting points to create a past for a hoped for future; borrowing from a known past, referencing current hoped for societal changes and imagining a time that might be yet to come to create a new future.
Approach
Creatively ‘suspect’ research methods: • subjective • peripatetic • fragmentary • using a feminist approach to retelling • using an uncertain narratives / narrators • It will not be a vision/s so clearly outlined, as in the works of Atwood, Le Guin, Russ but will continue with the ambiguity, silliness and slipperiness of my previous work.
Might be going to - speculative and peripatetic, and my research is to be subjective, fragmentary and slight,
Inputs
Research as a method of creation
Fragments and left overs from a possible future
Speculations and rumours of a world yet to come
An opportunity to manifest a hoped for, desired, alternative queer-feminist future
Reading List
““THE PEOPLE IN this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now […]The difficulty of translation from a language that dissent yet exist is considerable, but there’s no need to exaggerate it. the past, after all, can be quite as obscure as the future […]The fact that it hasn’t been, th here absence of a text to translate, doesn’t make all that much difference. What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now.
“Towards an Archeology of the Future””
Reading List
