Blue Corvidae 2025

Abstract

PRISMATIC MELANCHOLY was constructed with anti-capitalist collective care in mind and an understanding that collective work must start with the self. This research originated with a desire to find a way for my spiritual-artistic practice to live in accordance with collective care praxes. With this in mind I adopt an autoethnographic exploration of my early experiences with religion and trauma– specifically the fragmenting effect they had on my developing queer-trans sense of self and how I might reapproach spirituality as a survival pathway through apostatic faith practices. As a mad, disabled, queer-trans multiplicity I was born into a series of tragedies that assured my bodymindspirit would never truly feel there was space enough for me. Strung from one ill-fitting home/label/town to the next, I began to crack, we began to splinter. Before long, compacted within the contours of societal expectation, our consciousness had shattered into multiplicity, pushing us to think multivalently despite our melancholy. In this project we were called to ask: what kind of relationship with divinity could support us in bearing the emotional distress of ongoing global catastrophe? And, more importantly, what kind of space could hold us, in all our multiplicity, such that we might be able to approach divinity?