the queer table,

2020

repository of feelings (love letters aren’t the same as touching you). 2020

roses from my partner on the other side of the border, 2020

nothing escapes the passage of time (6 months of separation), 2020



Sara Ahmed gives poetic insight into queer objects in her book Queer Phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. “When we tread on paths that are less trodden, which we are not sure are paths at all… we might need even more support. The queer table would here refer to all those ways in which queers find support for their actions, including our own bodies, and the bodies of other queers” (170). Ahmed then concludes the paragraph giving a poignant definition of queer. “The queer body is not alone; queer does not reside in a body or an object, and is dependent on the mutuality of support” (170). This definition of queer aligns with the use of the table and the intentions of the letters, and the feelings of love that they encapsulate. “Anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards finds archives as “ambiguously dynamic” as materiality entangled in active social relations” (Hennessy & Smith, 131). In this tabletop series, I see human relationships and sunlight as active collaborators and subjects within a queer archival practice.