Strange Terrain: Institute of Queer Ecology in Conversation with Jack Halberstam

Urban Video Project (UVP) will present media arts collective The Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO) for an multimedia artist talk followed by panel discussion with writer and scholar Jack Halberstam using Halberstam’s concepts “unworlding” and “bewilderment” as a way to reimagine inhabiting the landscape beyond colonial and extractive practices.

This event will take place in the Everson Museum’s Hosmer Auditorium in conjunction with an exhibition of new work (working title: Hysteria) by IQECO specially commissioned for UVP, which will be shown as an architectural projection on the facade of the Everson. Additional work by IQECO will also be on view inside the museum.

In early 2023, Urban Video Project (UVP) hosted the Institute of Queer Ecology for a residency. During their residency, the artists worked with local performers and shot footage for a new piece in Syracuse and at various sites around Central New York, including the Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant at Onondaga Lake, Three Falls Park, Pratts Falls, and Stone Quarry Hill Art Park. This piece explores the poorly understood “dancing plagues” of the medieval era, in which the afflicted danced, often in massive groups, to the point of collapse. These strange events are now thought to have been the result of a combination of psychosocial contagion and, perhaps, water-born environmental contamination. IQECO reimagines the uncontrolled dance of choreomania as a mode of queer resistance to environmental degradation.

In making the work here in Syracuse, IQECO were particularly interested in the contrast between the Central New York landscape as a site of “pristine” natural beauty—e.g. Pratt’s Falls—and as a site of ecological damage, such as Onondaga Lake, with its complex status as both a sacred place for the Onondaga Nation and as an EPA Superfund site once dubbed the “most polluted lake in the America”, now in the process of ongoing remediation.

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