With our festival this year, we aim to give a platform to those artists who embrace controversy and confrontation. If you could offer a stage to one (radical) artist yourself, who would it be and why?

She is no longer with us and she isn’t classified as an artist, but I would want to hear Bell Hooks speak about love. In our current times of hopelessness, fear, and paralysis in the face of uncertainty, there is nothing more radical than leaning on love and choosing its power over the power of fear. This is also a moment to step away from homogenised and toxic views of love, and articulate love as the highest ideals of ourselves: courage, compassion, commitment to justice, and respecting deeply the humanity of the other. Only when we allow love to guide us can we be open to transforming with each other.

Your artistic practice seems to highlight and orient itself around two poles opposite in scale: the miniscule, invisible-to-the-naked-eye microtoxin, and massive corporate conglomerates – especially evident in Estroworld-Now: The Quarantine Edition (2021). How does spotlighting two points so disparate in scale allow you to more deeply explore gender politics, biotechnology, and mass political imaginaries.

The point is that they’re all connected in deeply invisible ways. Much like Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” the micro-to-macro entanglements of the Estroworld are so vast and pervasive that they’re almost impossible to perceive or make sense of. Awareness and excavation is the first step to transformation, but it’s initially hard to accept what you discover. That’s the “secondary trauma” of the Estroworld, the inability to figure a way out because we are still in what Paolo Freire calls “limit situations,” anti-dialogical structures of oppression and fragmentation that prevent true connectivity.

For example, I used to wish that love and care could scale up as easily and readily as harm and toxicity. Then I realised that love could exist at every layer of alienation that we experience. After all, the only truth in life is change. Just look at all the non-human species who share the same hormone receptors as us, sharing the same capacity to mutate with toxicities. We have no other choice but to transform. We have to love the alien, and we have to love through our permeability. Whatever we consider weakness or waste to be thrown away, could actually be a source of liberation. And the journey to get there has to be done together in our multiplicity, much like the molecules in their co-existence with the planetary.

We all have to deal with things we don’t like or that make us uncomfortable, from doing chores to having difficult conversations. On a more lighthearted note: what is something you hate dealing with, and why?

It’s hard to name something because I am a very accepting person, but I’ve had to deal a lot with toxic and unhealthy emotionality. The kind of emoting that uses blaming, victimising, ego, and harm. I’ve made the mistake many times of absorbing these emotions as my own and identifying with them. I suffered a lot from this in childhood well into my 20s. Today, depending on the person or the encounter, I deal with toxic emotions by giving grace. Maybe that person is having a bad day, or they are not loving themselves. In really bad situations, I have to detach my aura from the other completely. But avoidance is never a strategy. The only way out is through, no matter how uncomfortable.

The subject of ‘workshopology’ formed the basis for your artist talk, In Love With the Alien, and appears to be an important element of your artistic ethos across the board. Can you explain a bit more about what this strategy is, and why you believe it is effective? What kind of advantages does it bring to current debates such as, for example, the Reinventing Manhood panel you took part in at the festival?

First I want to say that love is a viable strategy, and loving the alien means loving through your own wounds of alienation. This applies to not just the personal, but to the planetary. Everything is connected, and the planet is navigating through a multitude of wounds that we’re all response-able for. These are wounds that fatefully bind us together. Manhood, coloniality, oppressive structures, in worst cases genocide and ecological destruction, all stem from the same place of fear and lovelessness that desires more fragmentation and self-profit than connectivity and liberation. It is the practice of othering, drawing a line, naming a border, and forming categories of violence. So how do we find ways to hold life and death in the same space, how do we continue to choose love over fear, and care for each through our collective grief? How do we retain our goodness, hope, values, and still experience pleasure?

This is where workshopology comes in. Workshopology, for me, begins with knowledge production and being amateurs together in humility. To give the most underrated example, we are all amateurs in the navigation of uncertainty. And through our multi-layered identities, mastery, and lived experiences, we can produce knowledge together in ways far beyond the homogenised institution. Next, workshopology is togetherness within multiplicity, the continuous negotiations between pluriversal ways of thinking (mind), being (body), and emoting (spirit). This is where we figure out what works and doesn’t work under an ethos of love and care. Finally, workshopology stands on our shared vulnerability and permeability. The alien connects us more than we know. But we must have the willingness and openness to change and transform together, allowing love to guide the way.