May 16, 2014
(c) Quintan Ana Wikswo
“A couple years ago, I was doing fieldwork outside St. Petersburg, working at the sites of State-operated rape camps. One day, I boarded a Russian ferry. I sought out the prow immediately. When at sea, I like to station myself at the prow. I like the way the word sounds, with all the shaping required by the lips. Not all words require such effort to utter, and this one also enjoys a bit of propulsion. It’s a word that sounds like what it is: moving through an element. Projecting. Cutting past, moving forward, leaving behind, going towards. Effort. Lots and lots of effort. Moving within a state of friction and opposition. Finding the yes within the no.”
That’s an excerpt from a new illustrated essay of mine called “The Hidden Forbidden,” just published on Degenerate Art Ensemble‘s Art Stream. Read it HERE.
They’ve also published another of my illustrated essays called “Re/vision Quest,” a quest whose talismans involve brain injuries, gentrification of the mind, pre-assimilation queerness, nasty lies, the spectacles of the dead, the corrugated roof of a silent mouth, an Appalachian doll trunk’s timespace distortion, voodoo queens, the KKK, rattlesnakes, erratic paths, seeing the unseen, envisioning the invisible. Read it HERE.
Here’s an excerpt: “I have a brain injury that affects both lobes of my brain, but rarely at the same time. Several times a week I lose the ability to comprehend spoken language, or to speak – my language center goes out, and the rerouted brain function supercharges my visual cortex. One of my most absolute tremendous joys in life is to escape the confines of language comprehension. While it is terrifying, it is also exhilarating to travel to a place (or time) where I cannot understand what is spoken and what is written, where I can exist within a world of language that evades me, where my mind releases language, and I am completely inside myself, completely evasive, completely free.”