Pollination as Praxis: The Queer Temporalities of Intimate Ecologies
To research climate colonialism as a Black woman in Europe is to live through the atrocities of imperialism from behind a thin veil of clingfilm. Cheap flimsy stuff from the pound shop, the kind you could sever with the strength of an outstretched tongue…
Developed over the period of her time as the 2020-21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Ama Josephine B. Johnstone shares new research, exploring her Black feminist methodology “Pollination as Praxis”, a method that attempts to encapsulate scapes of time, place, embodiment, and ecology through an erotics of call and response: conversations.
Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a researcher, speculative writer, artist and pleasure activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism to catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered futurities. Ama is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis at Birkbeck, where her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to rethinking Black climate changed futures, with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and across the Black diaspora. Ama is the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with Bard College (New York), a curatorial fellow with Frame Contemporary Art Finland and EVA International (Limerick), has had her essays, short fiction and art writing published internationally, and is currently exhibiting installation work across the United Kingdom.
The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism is made possible through a grant from the Keith Haring Foundation. The Keith Haring Fellowship is a cross-disciplinary, annual, visiting Fellowship for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at both the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project at Bard College. The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism was established to allow a distinguished leader in the field to investigate the role of art as a catalyst for social change, linking the two programs and presenting original research in an annual lecture.
For more information on The Keith Haring Foundation – www.haring.com.
For more information on the Human Rights Project at Bard College – http://hrp.bard.edu.