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With Forests in Our Mouths: Speaking Queer Utopias into Being

Application summary

We are applying for working grants for two years, from January 2024 to December 2025, for artists Aslan and Chris Gylee. Working together as the Queer multidisciplinary performance collective ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, we will create and present the project With Forests in Our Mouths: Speaking Queer Utopias into Being. We will bring together live performance, filmworks, sound installation and publication to explore multiple visions of Queer utopias. We will use Queer biography, speculative fiction, and auto-ethnography as the raw material for this two-year project. With Forests in Our Mouths is a ‘constellation artwork’ and each chapter offers an entry into the artistic enquiry of the overall work. It can be accessed in various times and places and in various different combinations. Audiences are given space to overlay their own interpretations and to make their own connections. The stories we will tell are Queer myths brought back from a place that exists outside of time and place — a forested planet, ghosts from utopias of the past, journeys through time and space, sex and starships, strange grammar. We ask: What if Queer people had brand new words to speak with? What if we had a place that we could truly call home? The project is an urgent attempt to imagine kinder, more accessible, and more sustainable futures where Queer bodies can thrive; it is an artistic attempt to answer the question: Where do we go from here?; and it represents a radical reimagining of our working practices, freed from the limitations and demands of the boom-bust cycle of short-term funding models. For With Forests in Our Mouths we will be based in our rural home and studio in Outokumpu, North Karelia, with research trips, residencies, and public sharings taking place in locations locally, across Finland, and internationally.

With Forests in Our Mouths is a two-year project to create a multidisciplinary ‘constellation artwork’ exploring the theme of Queer Utopias. The work is made up of twelve ‘chapters’ that are arranged non hierarchically. Each chapter can be experienced in isolation as a narrative in its own right and also contributes to the artistic enquiry of the larger whole. These twelve chapters are not fixed in place and audiences have been able to access them at various times, in different places and media. We encouraged each audience member to experience the work in their own way, at their own pace, and to make their own connections and conclusions within the ‘constellation’. It was a key aim of our artistic research to discover how a multifaceted artwork can be meaningful to different people with diverse life experiences. With Forests in Our Mouths ran from 1st January 2024 until 31st December 2025. During a two-months residency at Saaren Kartano (Nov & Dec 24) we researched how accessibility can be applied to our practice to make our artworks gentler and more nourishing for both ourselves and our artistic collaborators, as well as our audiences. We asked, how can our work reach audiences who are unable to come to a gallery or a theatre? How can we engage across distances of time and space? With Forests in Our Mouths is highly multidisciplinary in nature. During the project we presented various artworks on various scales in various venues. Chapters were shared in Finland and Germany, including at four festivals, as well as in print and online. During the course of the two-years of With Forests in Our Mouths we also worked regularly with the Damiá speech community. With Forests in Our Mouths included: five live performance works; two solo exhibitions; one soundwork in a group exhibition; two short film works; and three publications. You can explore the twelve chapters of With Forests in Our Mouths via a dedicated website here: www.withforestsinourmouths.com.

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