AQUA LOCI: Patrick Kelly

As a queer smartphone filmmaker-scholar, I am interested in approaching this collaboration by embracing improvisational wayfaring methods to collect audio-visual materials and piece them together in essayistic ways that explore ‘acts of nature’ (Barad 2011, p.150). Barad asserts that ‘there is something inherently queer about the nature of matter’ (ibid, p.137), and this can be observed in the ‘quantum leaps’ that acts of nature often perform. Steele et. al. ask, ‘What if: dirt and water finally voiced, now alive…; their soft murmuring becoming a loud cry, recognised through the biochemical discovery of molecular memory and multispecies entanglement’ (2020, p.251). I am interested in how queer acts of nature involving waterways can be observed, layered, explicated, and further problematised. My contribution to this project would be focused along parts of Merri-bek and Yarra Yarra – from Coburg to Abbotsford – and would seek to give voice to these quantum leaps, molecular memories, and multispecies entanglements that defy clean, clear utopias and dystopias. 

Barad, K. (2011). Nature's queer performativity. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 19(2), 121-158.

Steele, W., Davison, A., and Reed, A. (2020) Imagining the Dirty Green City. Australian geographer, 51(2), 239–256.

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