American Artist, Caitlin Cherry, Nora N. Khan, and Sondra Perry - Projects - Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

“Everyone contains a history of contamination; purity is not an option.” 1

In the event of disaster, we, the people who have always been surviving, will simply continue to survive. We have learned skills you wouldn’t believe, enduring under police states. We refine trauma into gold and use exile as jet propellant.

Yet we lack a vision of our lives past survival. What will we do when we head “back to the land” that was never ours? We do not see ourselves in the paranoiac manuals of preppers, in minimalist lifestyle retreats, in the nativist isolationism of militiamen.

We do not want to repeat these dreams of being the center, forever tyrants over little kingdoms. In this beyond, we will contaminate one another. We first learn from the past, building lookouts to keep our homes from burning.

We then seek an unruly communion. New languages, icons, guides, rituals, spun and fired beneath a twilight canopy of fungi. We claim a gorgeous, baroque maximalism, a future that sounds, looks, and feels like our innermost thoughts.

1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 31.

Selected Works

Selected Works Thumbnails

Installation View of A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN at Performance Space New York. Photo by Genevieve Hanson.