Recipes for World-building: The Rot & Rebirth of Dreams

This autumn, I met Bones Tan Jones on a dancefloor in Athens, where we spoke about queer myth-making and care. They were installing The New Elementals (2021), a video installation commissioned for the 7th Athens Biennale. In their catalogue text, they conjured a recipe for what they term ‘optimistic dystopias’: the acceptance of dystopias with joy, mysticism and optimism. We continued our conversation in London, where Tan Jones is based and where they run Shadow Sistxrs Fight Club, a self-defence class for women, QTIPoC and non-binary people.

Formerly known as Ayesha Tan Jones, the artist has since changed their name to Bones (骨头), a childhood nick-name which honours their trans identity. Their multifaceted practice ranges from operatic performances and films, to installations exploring de-gendered creation myths. As Tan Jones attests, “to be trans is to be rebirthed each day,” sculpting the self into existence through psycho-social material. We developed the following experimental dialogue alongside a world-building workshop at Harlesden High Street in London. Rooted in the artist’s recent Shanghai Biennale installation, the dialogue uses eco-poetics to explore alternate ways of being in a world that is rotting.

OPTIMISM IN ROT

Tamara Hart Bones, I love that your recipe for ‘optimistic dystopias’ is gluten-free. It’s also a poetic starting point for the visioning of queer futures. How did your idea of optimistic dystopias emerge?

Bones Tan-Jones I had this naive, ideal vision of living in a utopia, but I had to come to terms with the fact that there’s no universal utopia. I realised that, even when our identity politics are similar to those of others, we have different ideas of utopia. We have to be okay with a dystopia, we can’t be beaten up over that. We have to find strength and optimism within it and go back into the depths of the mystical.  

In 2017, I connected with Monique Etienne, who I run Shadow Sistxrs Fight Club with. I thought this is exactly what optimistic dystopia is, creating a space where people who identify as queer, women, trans, and people of colour, are able to come, because the world outside has forced them to protect themselves. It would be a utopia if we didn’t need to learn self defence, but we do. The year we founded Shadow Sistxrs, there were so many attacks in our local communities. The space we created was rooted in mysticism and collective healing, in response to harrowing conditions. 

TH There’s one line in your recipe that holds political weight: Your visions may have dried up. or they may not have, this really doesn’t matter. because the intention was there. and you drew them. Does it matter if visions materialise so long as there’s intention behind them? 

BTJ Even within an optimistic dystopia, there are more and more things in the world to be heartbroken over —in politics, in the news, in the climate— and it’s increasingly harder to be optimistic. Optimistic dystopia is very much rooted in being queer. In our communities, we talk about envisioning a utopia, but we’re not all queer in the world. So that’s a vision that might not materialise. Our dream for a queer utopia is important to have, though, because it allows us to hold onto something we can vision towards. We can at least strive for steps, like passing bills, or making healthcare accessible for trans folk. These aren’t the end points of a queer utopia, because the end point would be that everyone’s gay.

TH Are we sure everyone isn’t gay? But, like you said, our different ideas of utopia wouldn’t match up anyways. This can result in a clash of social and political visions, which I feel often leads to apathy. What happens to visions that don’t materialise, but rot? They can become stagnant, or they can become fertilisers. 

TH There are different ingredients we bring to communities. Optimism is one: a positive criticality to navigate inhospitable environments. Your opera-performance series Parasites of Pangu speaks to this critical optimism, by queering frameworks of thinking. Can you say more about the Chinese creation myth the series is based on? 

BTJ In the Chinese myth of Pangu, the parasites on Pangu’s body become humans. I think all creation myths are queer. Different cultures have creation myths that claim to invent gender. They often begin with, “He invented man.” Well how is the creator a he if man hasn’t been created yet? I found a Chinese scholar, Xiumei Pu, who writes about Pangu as queer, using the pronoun ‘tā’. In the Chinese language, the various pronouns of tā are pronounced in the same way, so when you’re speaking you say tā for a woman, a man, or a they. But, the way it’s written is slightly different. In the myth, Pangu holds heaven and earth apart and they grow and grow, until they can’t grow anymore. Then, they collapse and their body turns into the earth, sun and moon.

TH This reminds me of Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl, a queer transformation story based on anti–origin narratives. With displaced identities, there’s often pressure to define origin, and it’s complex to answer the question: where are you from? I can’t imagine how to answer that when you’re from multiple places, or when you inhabit multiple genders. Lai adopts the Chinese creation myth of Nüwa, reclaiming identity through a history that isn’t factual but rather is inscribed on the body. 

BTJ I love Nüwa – it’s about sculpting from clay, right?

TH Yes! So it goes that Nüwa creates humanity out of her loneliness. She moulds earth and clay to shape people. In Lai’s book, this myth is one of many origin points. The protagonist Miranda, for example, has an ambiguous queer birth involving a durian. She smells of the fruit’s ‘pissy-pepper’ scent her entire life. It’s argued by many that the diasporic subject emerges through what Marianna Hirsch terms ‘post-memory’: the relationship to traumatic experiences of previous generations, which transfers to post-generations as affective memories. I think you could argue the same for the ‘genderless subject’, of not having one point of origin or temporality, but rather a circular post-memory existence. 

BTJI love this idea of circular birth narratives because there are so many ways to be born and re-born every day. As a genderqueer person, you rebirth yourself every time you step out of the house.

ECO CARETAKING

TH Your work also looks at ecological rebirth. Parasites of Pangu takes place after an apocalypse, when the elite class has frozen their bodies through cryogenics. They fly around the Earth in pods until the planet is habitable again. Meanwhile, five characters return to Earth and become its caretakers. This leads to the question: who will be our caretakers?

BTJ That’s what the film at the Athens Biennale is about; the five who survived and returned to Earth, who were chosen to be caretakers through a pop bootcamp. These people didn’t have earthly ties anymore, so they could be frozen. The film was an expansion on how they became the Earth’s caretakers.

I worry there are people who can afford to care but don’t, and they’re just going to fly off to Mars. So we’re going to be left with this rotten earth, and have to compost it, nurture it. In Octavia Butler’s parable series, Earthseed, the community wants to take root among the stars. But I feel we are the stars, and we’ve got to take root in ourselves before going elsewhere. We need to heal the Earth. And we’re seeing who our caretakers are going to be: young people who are climate striking, who are showing their care.

TH This brings up questions around the inheritance of care: who has the responsibility to care and who is exempt from caring? And how can we be optimistic if we know the world will end in ecological crisis?

BTJ It’s these little things we feed ourselves within our daily rituals that will keep our optimism up. I work a lot with herb magic, through studying herbs on a planetary level. All herbs are ruled by different planets, just like we are as star signs. I was burning mugwort earlier, which is ruled by the Moon. Rosemary is ruled by the Sun and yarrow by Venus. If I want to bring more joy, sun and wisdom into my life, I might use rosemary in a ritual. So it’s important to think about the planetary alignments of the herbs and their medicinal uses, because that’s the energy they bring to rituals or spells.

I feel the same way about sculpture. If I include certain herbs or energies that I know are meant to promote peace or love, it shapes the experience of the work. It’s the same with my music, I put frequencies in that are meant to bring out different feelings. So in the opera-performances, the frequency 75 Hz is in the background, which is the frequency for grief. The notes of the opera in the first few lines are D-E-A-D, based on artist Bruce Nauman’s Violin Tuned D.E.A.D. They’re all ingredients. Shadow Sistxrs was also a way to sculpt space in which community could exist.

TH It’s true, you can hear grief and pain in the heart-rending chords of the opera. In social settings, I think our bodies are also choreographed to feel certain ways. In the ritual of dancing, for instance, we feel our bodies should be joyful. But I personally love crying on the dancefloor; it feels radical in the way it protests. Social theorist Andrew Hewitt has this great quote about the performance of ideology in dance:

If the body I dance with and the body I work and walk with are one and the same, I must, when dancing, necessarily entertain the suspicion that all of the body’s movements are, to a greater or lesser extent, choreographed.

Maybe it’s about putting rituals in place to change how we move through, and protest, social architecture.

BTJ The club as a space is a good example of that. I think people go to events and drag up. What we wear, how we dress, how we perform, these are all survivalist tools. We talk about that in Shadow Sistxrs. The ‘false surrender’ is one of our moves, where you say, “take anything you want, I’m yours,” and during that false surrender you’re actually grabbing their finger and breaking it. 

TH What would be an ecological false surrender? 

BTJ In some ways we’re falsely surrendering, because we’re pretending to do something about the environment but not actually doing anything. But who do we surrender to? Who controls the climate?

TH And individual responsibility is put on us to change these overwhelming issues that are so expansive, they can’t be located in space or time. They’re also impossible to change if you think you’re at it alone and, because there’s so much hyper-individualism, we all feel like we’re at it alone. Communities protest that. 

BTJI agree with this hyper-individualism; the general population has been told that it’s all our fault when it’s totally not. We do buy into big companies but often it’s because there’s no other choice, it’s the big companies that can effect change.

QUEER CIRCULARITY

TH I feel this also speaks to queer political causes, which lose their radicality in the abstract matrix of individual capitalism. These causes are co-opted and watered down to make them digestible or recognisable. How do we fight the fetishism of queer movements, especially when they’re integral to our identities and practices? 

BTJ It’s about keeping things grassroots and maintaining awareness that it’s usually the community that will fund people who need it most, rather than corporations. You see it in GoFundMe’s all the time. For instance, having trans people on the covers of magazines is optics because there are still trans people who lack access to healthcare.

I see it when I model, it’s so blatant. You’re cast as the non-binary model and you know you’re there for optics. In terms of staying radical, it’s disheartening. Often you’re paid to share the campaign online, even when they misgender you on set. I’ve done a lot of speaking out, and it’s tiring because it doesn’t seem to get anywhere. 

TH That brings us back to the question of optimism. How do we keep motivated to build alternate worlds through all this fog? If future meets past, the tools we need are already seeded in the earth, under our toes.

BTJWe need to dig our hands into the ground and fumble along the thick, fleshy roots of a common weed. See its shadows for the first time, see the creepers and crawlies who burrow there, worms that slide through our fingers. Sniff the microbes and wear them on our wrists like perfume as we step into the next moment.