Stickering through Grief

Subverting Normative Practices Through Mourning and Memorial

In 2021, my friends and family experienced the sudden loss of our dear friend Justin. Justin was essentially my older brother; a childhood friend to my older sister who spent many nights at our dinner table discussing music, art, and all things culture. Justin was a rebel through and through, and following his creative nature, he discovered graffiti as an outlet for expression and subversion. With his deep intellect and equal appreciation for everything unpretentious, Justin taught me everything about being cool. In the weeks after his passing, a mutual friend and artist, Michael Vickers, had the idea to print copies of a sticker Justin had made with his tag on it and distribute it among friends, a way to ensure we could all share in this altar building. I agreed to scan the sticker, and together we printed thousands of copies. A mailing list of familiar and new names was built across Canada. Through mailing envelopes and distributing Justin’s work, a community art practice was initiated. Calling on the histories of mail art, graffiti, relational aesthetics, and social art, we spread the stickers across the country and then the world. Justin unwittingly brought together everyone from mothers to school teachers to coworkers to commit petty crimes in the name of grief and memory. In this paper, I frame the collective sticker project as an example of communal grief, affective mapping, and anti-temporal mourning, combining concepts from the scholarship of Dominick LaCapra, Kelly Oliver, Judith Butler, Leigh Gilmore and Shelley Hornstein. By reflecting on the project, I aim to expand our current understanding of the legibility of mourning in public spaces and remembrance practices through graffiti. I will explore how the collective initiative speaks to the tensions between past and present, embodied and empirical ways of knowing, and the ephemeral qualities of graffiti and human life, as well as the tensions surrounding who can (or should) participate in such a particular subcultural experience. The stickering project exemplifies how creative practice can bear witness to the autobiographical nature of graffiti, while also expanding the form into a communal grief practice that subverts expectations of the cultural context in which it was produced while acknowledging the difficulty of time, distance, and logistics. Fig. 1: Justin’s original sticker, scanned Grief is terribly absurd; it weighs down as much as it reorients, making navigation seem impossible. Socially, it is commonly understood that grief unfolds…

The Divine as Non-Binary

The Ambiguous Transpoetics of Three Trans, Genderfluid and Genderqueer Figures from Hindu Mythology

s/he around shiva’s neck is a ring of moonflowers. ardhanarishwara, part-man, part-woman, shiva & parvati are fused in the same body. a divine union. their third eye of liquid fire opens like a crimson mouth, from which      songs of wrath & serenity emerge. snakes   garland their one-breasted torso            just as the flowers do but brighter, more luminous, scales a pearly silver under the moon. the moon itself is mounted    on shiva-parvati’s head, the ganga crashing down to earth from their long, black hair  in a shining rush of cacophonic water                    that thunders like        the sky does before lightning. the river of life, the river that gives life. relentless. but shiva-parvati sit undisturbed, lost in the ecstasy  of meditation, of dhyan, the mirror-clear contemplation   of the universe. a constellation of thoughts as   distant & irrelevant to us as the galaxies spinning outwards from their joint mind. their loins are half-phallus & half-vulva, half-shisna & half-yoni, simultaneously conceiving & birthing      the world as we know it:           matter & energy                        particle & wave.   when I was a child, I felt    small in comparison, dwarfed by the enormity of this unified being, the masculine & the feminine rendered pointless by a beauty so immense that under its weight, cracks of want appeared in my psyche — I wanted this. I wanted to be neither, to be both. I wanted to be garlanded by snakes, tied to this mortal realm only by a bond as insubstantial as that necklace of flowers,                held here only by love & not by      any duty beyond that, any duty to shape or form, logic or illogic. I wanted to contemplate   & become the universe as they did. I wanted to sing & for my songs to become fire, for my dancing      to become destruction, for my flesh to glow   like a blood-red kiln & for sparks to glance off my skin        as it melted away, leaving only the bronze gleam of my spirit within:                         becoming nataraja       as I danced away the limitations of body & mind. let the humans keep me now. let them                                      try.   translations ardhanarishwara: half-woman and half-man dhyan: concentration, particularly in the context of meditation shisna: penis yoni: vagina nataraja: another name for Shiva, generally used to refer to his dancing form  …

A_Sociality as a Model Figure of Ambiguity

Being queerly social and cared for holds a promise of belonging. Belonging beyond heteronormativity and coercive normalcy. [1] Yet social relations, no matter how queer they are, are never devoid of indifference, unpredictability, aggression, conflict, or the risk and reality of violence. [2] It is illusory to hope for safe spaces, pure peacefulness or pleasure in bonding and care without aggression or messiness. [3] Therefore, I present queerness as lived ambiguity and […]