Endangered! The Interwoven World of Toxic Creatures
2017
This video makes a critical parody of nature and ethnographic documentaries. In the montage, piracy, relationality, and associative thinking become conceptual and formal methods, used to connect the relationship between economic disaster and ecological disaster. We juxtapose our footage with found footage, skipping like flipping through channels on an old TV, in order to complicate multiple gazes–male, colonizing, commercialized, medical, etc. Along with the polymorphous perverse creature characters that can have an orgy with the environment, the clips cover a wide range of topics, connected through their rhetoric and entangled histories. In doing so, the video tries to gesture toward figuring out what to do with the current disastrous, planetary situation. World industry and economy are inextricably intertwined with the colonizing logic that gives the grounds for the land abuse, pollution, and oppression of populations that are considered “lesser-than” humans according to national and transnational hegemonic norms–toxicities that must be erased or kept out for fear of contamination, frozen in time by the ethnographic gaze. For such circumstances, the video offers the deterritorialization of desire–in the sense of de-Oedipalizing and de-normativizing sexuality–as a necessary solution to, or after-effect of, the toxic pollution and capitalism that have created a destroyed world. Quoted authors in the video include Mel Y. Chen, Christina Sharpe, and Naomi Klein.
Installation View
At NYU Gallatin Galleries, 2017
Endangered! The Interwoven World of Toxic Creatures mixes a parody on ethnographic and nature documentaries with found footage to show how classification and globalization have created a destroyed, interconnected world. The installation continues this concept as a rhizomatic growth contaminating the gallery space.
