About

Watch Quintan’s talk about her artistic practice at her Creative Capital presentation.

Read Quintan’s autobiographical texts for SOUTHERN COMFORT in Gulf Coast Journal. 

Read Quintan’s memoir non-fiction essay FIELDWORK in Guernica magazine.

Watch Quintan’s film FIELDWORK

Watch Quintan’s solo performance DRONES

Hailed as “heady, euphoric, singular, surprising” by Publisher’s Weekly, “beautiful, horrifying, passionate, and bold,” by Jeff VanderMeer in The Millions, “Rilke’s lost female shadow,” by Conjunctions, and “universal and personal, comforting and jarring, ethereal and earthy,” by Electric Literature, QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO is recognized for innovative hybrid works that integrate her fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry and essay with her original photography, performance, audio, and video installation.

Since 1988, Wikswo’s methodology is deeply grounded in collaborative and coalition-based organizing principles, long-term project fieldwork commitments, autobiography, forensic ecology, and intersectionality. Wikswo’s practice involves multi-year personal habitations of occluded sites with complex histories of life and existence.

This work is guided by the multifacted  – and often secret or unspoken – legacies of human, ecological and anthropocene history that inform contemporary behaviors, beliefs, and systems of being. Her final projects create sites for investigation and discourse around existential questions about humanity, our societies, and how we can navigate beyond the limited boundaries that we are taught contain us.

Her forty major projects and commissions are published, exhibited, performed, presented, collected, and archived at institutions and centers throughout the world.

Wikswo’s books include the acclaimed collection of photographs and stories The Hope Of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House Press), the hybrid poetics novel with photographs A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be (Stalking Horse Press), the artist book Schwarzer Tod and the Useless Eaters (Catalysis Projects), and the exhibition catalogue of her Sonderbauten project, Rituale gegen das Vergessen (Kehler Verlag/Berlin Jewish Museum). Her work appears in anthologies including They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press), Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance (UMass Amherst), One Blood: The Narrative Influence (University of Alaska), Procession for the Extracted: Site-Located Artmaking at California Gold Mines (California College of Art), QDA: Queer Disability Anthology (and multiple editions of the annual performance anthology Emergency Index (Ugly Duckling Presse).

Wikswo’s ongoing journal and magazine publications in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art include regular contributions to Tin House, Conjunctions, Guernica, The Rumpus, _nY_ Amsterdam, Warscapes, DIAGRAM, the Kenyon Review, and many more.

Wikswo’s visual art, text and video installations have received three solo museum exhibitions in New York City and Berlin, and appear regularly in museums, galleries and performance spaces including Brooklyn Museum, ZKM, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art/LA MOCA, Berlin Jewish Museum, University of Southern California, New York University, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Museum of Modern Art (France), University of Missouri, Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), F.A.C.T. Foundation for Art and Technology UK, and many more.

Wikswo’s solo and collaborative live performance works are actively presented onstage, in museum exhibitions, and site-specific installation featuring their hybrid text, libretto, film/video installation and projection, and original scores by prominent new music and jazz composers including Anne LeBerge, Pamela Madsen, Veronika Krausas, Isaac Schankler, James Ilgenfritz, Arthur Kell, Tom Flaherty, Bill Alves, and more. They perform regularly in New York City and elsewhere with Lydia Lunch, Nicholas Isherwood, and others at venues including (Le) Poisson Rouge, Dixon Place, Bowery Poetry Club, Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the City of Munich, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, and more.

Wikswo has been an artist on significant institutional projects that transcend partisan agendae and advance politically unaffiliated cultural endeavors, including artistic initiatives for the German Foreign Office, the German State Department, the Haus der Kulteren der Welt (Berlin), The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Colin Powell School for Global and Civic Leadership at City College New York, the Institute for Global Violence Against Women (CUNY). A specialist in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial models of space and time, she works in multiple current and former colonies and territories of the USA, France, the UK, Germany and other European and American nations. She has worked extensively on the Tohono O’odham Nation, and non-governmental organizations internationally

A Creative Capital Grantee in Emerging Fields, Wikswo’s work has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Theo Westenberg Foundation, the Center for Cultural Innovation, For Site Foundation, ARC-Durfee, Oberfaltzer Kunstlerhaus, Montalvo Arts Center, Djerassi, Puffin Foundation, Millay Colony. Wikswo has received multiple fellowships to Yaddo, including the Pollock Krasner Residency. They are a member of PEN USA and serves as guest artist, juror, visiting lecturer, and strategic advisor at multiple arts as well as geopolitical justice institutions.

Wikswo maintains a lively commissioning practice, as well as an international visiting professor and visiting artist practice at New York University, California State University at Fullerton, San Francisco State University, Colgate College, City University of New York (CUNY), State University of New York (SUNY), University of California, California College of the Arts, Old Dominion University, Yeshiva University, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and many more. Wikswo’s primary academic teaching focus is to guide students and student artists beyond the boundaries of discipline, and into galvanic encounters with new forms and tools for intensifying their own practice, developing a lifelong process of self-direction, and encountering the world with as much freedom of movement and expression as possible, and then a bit more.

She is completing Slaughter Parties, a transdisciplinary book about the experience of global and local first responders, fieldworkers, peacekeepers, mercenaries, journalists, and the peculiarities of those rambling rhizomes who reside at contended sites and conflict zones.

A 7-minute presentation of her methodology and practice can be viewed online via Creative Capital:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXOlLpHnIJ8

“Author and visual artist Wikswo’s juxtaposes dreamy, surreal prose with shadowed, ambiguous, occluded dreamscapes to haunting effect—heady, euphoric, and full with loss. Wikswo’s singular lines strike like the tone of a bell while her beautifully composed images echo the surprising twists of language. [Her work] defies genre or distillation and instead takes the reader/viewer on a journey where myth, mystery, and the impossible have never seemed more real.” Publisher’s Weekly

“One of Brooklyn’s most engaging artistic and literary voices.”  – Greenlight Books 

“Quintan Ana Wikswo’s trenchant interdisciplinary investigation into the sites of massacres and other atrocities is a vivid reminder that art no longer serves religion, but is progressively supplanting it in terms of ritual and sanctity.”
– Thomas Micchelli, Hyperallergic 

“[Quintan Ana Wikswo explores] humanity from the outside, not just crossing genres but exploding them. Quintan combines text and photography to give us characters who have left their bodies, and whose stories have become boundless. She writes with both a lightness and the weight of lives unlived, of remorse, and of loss.” – Pixelated

“A seduction and an insurrection: a paean to lovers, explorers, resisters, and those without borders.”
—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

“It’s more than the way W.G. Sebald, Jesse Ball and Teju Cole have used photographs to punctuate and accentuate the narratives they write; there’s a sense of collage here, of the images being used to state things where words no longer suffice.” – Chicago Star Tribune

At the heart of my work are questions surrounding the construction and depiction of reality and realities – truths and histories. I am curious about how tactics of storytelling and narrative are used to create and control mythos and historicity – as weapons of hegemonic power, but also as tools of resistance and liberation. I investigate how narratives are coded into the human body, mind, and psyche through a potent matrix of sexuality and erotics; trauma, violence and militarism; and altered states of consciousness.

Within this work, I focus on projects with which I had first-hand personal, direct and/or ancestral experience – I therefore stood simultaneously as witness and as instigator, as perpetrator and victim, insider and outsider, survivor and bystander, solution and problem, rescuer and betrayer.

Oftem, my interdisciplinary projects investigate how states and their institutions and communities define the official stories of ab/normalcy and belonging. How is narrative used to enforce control over human activity, and what are the methods of enforcement? Where – and on whose bodies – are official histories encoded over time? What are the processes for these coded stories?

I create multi-voiced portraits of place over time, and time across place…constructing new evidence that resists erasure and interrupts the prevailing narratives. I work in literature, photography, video/film, and performance to create a single project. Each project is comprised of a constellation of independent but interconnected poems, texts, stories, essays, video installations, large-scale photographs, books, solo and collaborative performance works, and site-specific rituals and rites.

In my photographs, videos, texts, and performances, I work to dislodge these timespace situations from their habitual representations and contexts. I work with the instruments to actively interrupt conventions and disrupt narrative and visual controls. They exhibit inappropriate, intrusive, and distracting aberrations in spelling, focus, spacing, exposure, margins, characters, and framing.

Place itself, like time, is a volatile abstraction in a constant state of destruction, construction, and deconstruction. Because the cameras and typewriters themselves are unlikely survivors of violence, they have unique capacities, wounds and histories.

My challenge is to incite new encounters and engagements with sites and stories that have been silenced. I am not interested in presenting an official story or replacing an old history with a new history. Instead, I wish to create a conversation with these disrupted voices and places to invoke a constellation of human realities.

– Quintan Ana Wikswo

For a full listing of current press, please visit: http://bumblemoth.com/category/press/

PRESS & PRAISE FOR THE HOPE OF FLOATING HAS CARRIED US THIS FAR:

“One of Brooklyn’s most engaging artistic and literary voices.” 
– Greenlight Books 

“These stunning, solitary and cinematic letters to the self (think of the Quays and Béla Tarr speaking together in dreamtime) bear witness to a world beloved and betrayed, the spent and brutal collisions of irretrievable loss with what might have been possible.”
—Rikki Ducornet on The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far 

“You will find within these pages a marvelous alchemy of image and text, all of it radiant, sensual, endlessly layered. The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far is at once a seduction and an insurrection: a paean to lovers, explorers, resisters, and those without borders.”
—National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynum on The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far 

“Quintan Ana Wikswo, in her unique and magnificent The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, has ignited an extraordinary condensation of texts and images that culls together spirit, compassion, and dreams. Throughout her foray into extensions of the mind and the limits of the body she exudes an uncanny power of magic and wizardry.”
—Lynn Hershman Leeson, Director of Women Art Revolution on The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far 

“In these stories, disasters in war and love trigger peculiar unexpected metamorphoses…Cataclysmic apocalypses such as hurricanes, political coups, and military invasions find equal footing with lovers’ quarrels, broken romances, and erotic negotiations. Instead of cause for destruction, these catastrophes become opportunities for transformation—especially from human to non-human.” 
– Maxine Chernoff in Literary Hub
read the interview here

“[The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far explores] humanity from the outside, not just crossing genres but exploding them. Quintan combines text and photography to give us characters who have left their bodies, and whose stories have become boundless. She writes with both a lightness and the weight of lives unlived, of remorse, and of loss.”—0s&1s / Pixelated on The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far 
read the interview here

PRESS & PRAISE FOR MERCY KILLING AKTION

“Quintan Ana Wikswo’s trenchant interdisciplinary investigation into the sites of massacres and other atrocities is a vivid reminder that art no longer serves religion, but is progressively supplanting it in terms of ritual and sanctity.”
– Thomas Micchelli, Hyperallergic on Mercy Killing Aktion

“The New York artist Quintan Ana Wikswo shows asylum photographs whose foreboding atmosphere is accentuated by technical simulations of the hypersensitive vision caused by post-traumatic stress disorder.”
– The Guardian UK
read the Critic’s Pick on Carrie Buried Beneath Catalpa Beans 

” Quintan Ana Wikswo…encourages visitors to rethink their understanding of mental health and wellbeing, by asking how far our personal wellbeing is related to the values of the society we live in and the impact of new technologies. By showcasing spaces formerly reserved for the mentally ill, Quintan Ana Wikswo provides insights into the historical context of mental illness and its surrounding power structures.”

– Faye Smith on Carrie Buried Beneath Catalpa Beans 
read the review in Purple Revolver

“This survey provides a well-designed forum for Wikswo’s images, which manage to take us somewhere we don’t want to go, and to do it not with a hammer to the head or to the senses, or with accepted and expected visual histories, but with a glimpse of blue sky or a blooming dandelion juxtaposed with a dance of barbed wire or a priapic guard’s tower. That’s pretty much the way it really was, after all.”
– Tom Christie, B.L.A.T.C. on Sonderbauten at the Berlin Jewish Museum
read the review on B.L.A.T.C.

“Alone amid cacti, barbed wire, and phone lines, she is looking for something. The figure raises her rake — which seems like half claw, half witch’s broom — above her head, then returns to it to the sand. The sun radiates in cactus spines, but she is dressed in what looks like a fur coat and a long, metallic sheath made from a Mylar emergency blanket. Where her head should be there is a red beaked mask from which hang wattles and clawed fingers. She is the Vulture Vulva Vigilante, a symbolic, threatening creature, invented by artis tQuintan Ana Wikswo, who seeks out female remains in the desert and commemorates them, taking a fierce stance against gender violence in the process.
– Ashley P. Taylor, Hyperallergic on Fieldwork
read the interview here: In The Desert, A Vulture Spirit Follows a Trail of Femicide 

PRESS ON “SONDERBAUTEN”

Berliner Morgenpost
Deutch Welle
Die Nacht Magazine
Theatre Geimende Berlin
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Judische Allgemeine

Artist in Residence – New York City
Colin Powell Center for Global and Civic Leadership
City College New York / CCNY
Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative
https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/colinpowellschool

Artist in Residence – Berlin and Mississippi
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Max Planck Institute, Berlin
Goethe Institute
Mississippi: An Anthropocene River / Field Station Natchez
www.hkw.de

FIELDSHIFT FURTHER (Co-Artistic Director)
…a transdisciplinary company creating new performance works at sites with human rights and ecological impact.
www.FieldshiftFurther.com

FLASHPOINT NYC (Core Artist)
…New York City’s jazz and literature live performance ensemble, premiering original works since 2012 at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Cornelia Street Cafe, Pete’s Candy Store, and many more iconic literary and live music venues.
www.FlashpointNYC.com

CATALYSIS PROJECTS / LA (Founding Director, Resident Artist)
…a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary arts organization that presents, publishes, and curates collaborative new works by leading California and international artists.
www.catalysisprojects.com

Creative Capital
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Max Plank Institute
Colin Powell School for Global and Civil Leadership at City College New York
Corporation of Yaddo
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Humanities
Pollock Krasner Foundation
Center for Cultural Innovation
People for the American Way
ARC/Durfee
Djerassi
Puffin Foundation
Ucross
Millay Colony
Villa Montalvo
Anderson Ranch Arts Center
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus
Can Serrat

For more interviews, please visit PRESS and ARTIST TALKS.

It has become clear that there are exactly thirteen questions asked about my work.  I have a fantasy of responding to these questions by number, like a desultory Oracle at Delphi on a time-management regimen, or a librarian who simply fails to comprehend why no one respects the efficiency of the Dewey Decimal System.

Q1. Who writes the poems, stories, and texts that you use in your projects? What is your process? Isn’t it a little peculiar to move around between disciplines of literature so much? And why do you work in multiple languages?

I write all my own poems, stories, essays, and texts for all my projects. They are original to me, and I take full and sole responsibility for what is mis/communicated.

If I’m creating a site-specific work, I typically haul my salvaged government typewriters out to the site. These texts begin as an exploration of how I’m processing and experiencing everything around me – a transcription of my brain. But the process expands to include conversations I have with people – witnesses, bystanders, storytellers, rabble rousers, and that’s largely based on my background working with oral histories in a human rights context.

Sometimes the work is narrative and sometimes more about sound or language or mood, or structure, form, or presentation. These pieces find their ways towards poetry or prose, essay or libretto. I am not at all interested in the conventions that segregate one from the other.

I write in multiple languages, and then I very often collaborate with translators to create “mirror texts” in English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hebrew, Diné… I like to build worlds in which multiple languages create nested architectures and voices.

Q2. Who takes the photographs that you use in your projects? What kind of cameras do you use? Are you working in film or digital? How do you get those colors? Do you use photoshop to get all those layers? 

I create all my photographs myself, using salvaged military film cameras that I find in junk shops or are gifted to me by strangers during fieldwork. I work with cameras that are indigenous to the site at which I’m working.

I work in medium format 120mm and 35mm film. Everything in the photographs is achieved in-camera, through old-fashioned mechanical and optical and chemical means – the colors, the layers, everything. There’s no digital manipulation at all, either in photoshop or some other computer software.

The layers that are apparent in the films are all created in camera, through as many as forty or fifty exposures. It’s all about calculating how each camera and film stock will respond to the amount of light. (That obsession is a good way to learn how to watch how the world glows.)

I use mostly broken and malfunctioning antique cameras, many of which I have adapted to encourage particularly unconventional responses to light and the chemical emulsions of film. When using film, it’s actual photons interacting with chemicals on the film. Because of that, the resulting photograph is the record of a fairly volatile organic process. It’s affected by many fluctuating variables – the chemicals’ age, their condition, their quality, how much light is allowed to contact them and under what circumstances, as well as the vicissitudes of development, digital scanning, and printing.

Likewise, when working with an 80 or 100 year old camera filled with rust, dirt, cracks, and battlefield detritus, each camera will respond uniquely to the film, to light, to lenses…most of their calibrations aren’t standardized. It takes a tremendous amount of time to build up a working relationship with each camera sufficient to produce even one image.

Similarly, it’s a challenge to find an intrepid lab willing to develop the film, and switch all the settings on a scanner that is capable of digitizing the unusual sizes and conditions and processing of the film. By the time all these variables have been managed, I don’t even have time left for Photoshop. (Although I admire people who push that software past its limits and into new terrain.)

Q3. Who shoots the films that you use in your projects? What kind of cameras do you use? Are you working in film or digital?

I shoot all my films myself, unless I’m performing site-specific works – such as Out Here Death Is No Big Deal – and in that case I have a really fantastic team of cinematographers and shooters with whom I work closely – their names are listed in the individual projects.

I use digital cameras as well as film cameras – typically experimental or homemade instruments whose primary purpose has nothing to do with high resolution and stands in direct opposition to the economic barriers erected around access to state of the art video cameras.

(My earliest films – Waterland, Apimania, and Chemise Eyes Lies – use public access archival film footage which I adapted and oftentimes re-animated.)

I use about thirty different kinds of cameras to create my films…a mixture of digital and analogue film. A lot of the films are created using animated photographic stills, which is time consuming and often gives audiences headaches, but I quite enjoy making them. Others are very simple scans of the entire film negative, in a kind of meditative panorama that also often gives audiences headaches, but I also quite enjoy making.

In general, the films are intended to be shown as projections during live performance or within installations – in both instances, human figures of performers and viewers take on a life-sized scale within the ecology and architecture and invented worlds of the films. On small screens without live performers, it’s a somewhat different experience that I consider more a meditation than a traditional film or video art installation.

Q4. Who creates the performance works that you do?  What is the process of working with collaborators? 

I write my own performance scripts, and either I or someone else performs or presents them. While I began working with performance collaborators, since 2015 I’ve begun performing my own work more and more – drawing on a literary tradition and a visual arts performance tradition…I’m certainly not a dancer or an actor by training. For some pieces, I work with various collaborators who have that kind of training.

All of the performance works begin with my own concept or thread of narrative, some sort of preoccupation that forms the bones of the piece.  If I’m working with  collaborators – composers, choreographers, actors – we work closely together to create the musculature: the sonic and movement vocabularies. In general, we do not all tell the same story, but instead work together to explore different and sometimes oppositional aspects of a world that we’re creating together.

Collaboration is an intimate relationship that in general requires trust, risk-taking, and exodus from the comfort zone. All of my collaborations have pulled me into new explorations and pushed me to acquire unforeseen skills and perspectives. As an evolving artist, collaboration can be an alchemical method for ongoing creative and intellectual evolution.

Q5. You make a lot of work about the Holocaust, and Plantation Slavery, and Eugenics, and Genocide against Indigenous Nations, as well as decidedly gloomy and perhaps irrelevant things that happened in Europe a long time ago, like the Crusades, the Witch Hunts, and the Inquisition. Why? Why? Why can’t you put the past behind you? America is bright and shiny and new and you persist in opening up wounds that have healed. Some folx find that incredibly irritating. 

I am not interested in quick analyses, reductive ethos, or un/comfortable truism that obscure the complexity beneath. Patterns established at the origins of the cosmos and of human civilization continue to unfold today in actually quite un/predictable ways. As Hannah Arendt writes, human existential progress may very well be an illusion. The only path towards liberation from our own cruelty and suffering winds through a circuitous landscape that traverses the entire globe, and our entire human presence upon it.

The United States was a colony of France, Spain, and England. I’m interested in the lacunae that exist between our continent’s indigenous roots, and the recently acquired/imposed culture of the colonizers.  In the United States, it’s a tempting illusion to imagine a new idealistic society free of the draconian legacies and limitations of Europe, of the past, of history. It’s equally tempting to think the atrocities and catastrophes of this new country are new inventions. However, the United States – as a nation – began as a grand experiment by the empires of Europe.

My initial intellectual interests were primarily 20th century US. Yet each thread that I pulled seemed to stretch back across the Atlantic to far more ancient methods of constructing societies. History is comprised of a series of patterns, almost all of which lead back an astonishingly great distance through time (if not through space).

There is very little that is new under the sun, and it’s a preoccupation of mine to link current events to those of a very distant history. It was difficult to work on the US-Mexico border in the midst of epidemic femicide and not wonder about the witch burnings. It remains difficult to see how the Catholic Church responds to the epidemic sexual abuse of children, and not wonder about patterns established during the Inquisition. It’s impossible to encounter a crematorium at a concentration camp, and not be aware that outsiders in Europe have been burned during all empire-building psychoses.

There have been many instances of genocide throughout human history, but none as comprehensively documented as the Holocaust. Because of this, it’s particularly illuminating to seek out those aspects of the Holocaust that nonetheless remain hidden or taboo, and ask questions that begin with why and how…

I have known many Holocaust survivors. I took the oral histories of people who survived the sexual crimes and medical crimes under the Nazis – their experiences were largely silenced or expunged from public testimonies. I also have worked closely with past and present Nazis, as well as their descendants, who wrestle with complexities of ancestry, legacy, otherness, and family secrecy. This constellation of voices and realities is central to my cosmos.

Some branches of my ancestors were refugees from many different corners of the earth, and quickly began to pollinate within many different corners of the Americas. The events of Europe and Africa were their intimate family tragedies and victories, and comprised storytelling traditions continents anr centuries apart yet still proximal.

Q6. You make a lot of work about the South, and a lot of it is pretty sad and gothic. Why?

I grew from a sprout to a seedling, and then have spread my rhizomatic roots  throughout the Southern Half of the United States – half in the “Old South” and half in the “Old West” – rural Appalachia, the Shenandoah Valley, the South Carolina Sea Islands, New Orleans, and many nooks and crannies of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

My family comes from both places, and from other continents, both before and after recorded time. Some of my family came here by will, and some by force. Some stayed within the racial and sexual rules, and some wildly transgressed them – either by choice, or by force. It’s complicated. Some ancestors arrived as survivors of genocide. Others came and perpetuated genocide. Some were slaves, some enslavers. Sometimes the survivors went on to persecute others, and sometimes the persecutors changed sides and became healers. Some ancestors lived here and worked for liberation for all and I try to live up to their legacy, while other ancestors contributed to humanitarian catastrophes whose repercussions cause pain and injustice to this day, and every day.

I try to exist in conversation and communion with all my ancestors, for I am a result of their strange genetic constellation. While I am not responsible for the actions of my ancestors, I know that I exist within their fabric, and the strings that I choose to weave represent agency, and responsibility, amends and justice, reparations and revenge.

As for the Old South, I was a small child looking deep into some of the most raw wounds and sacred places of this young nation. That has only amplified as I have lived around the world

I find life in space over time to be beautiful, soulful, wrending, passionate, transcendent, profoundly sensual. Senses that exist nowhere else exist in the moist dark places of the American south. And other places that are bright and dry, or becoming so.

The reverberations of these epic timespace nodes seem at times to be little more pop culture cliches, but at their core it’s simply vast human emotion placed within the confines of narrative.

Gothic is just a catchphrase for bounded torment, wherever it might occur.

Q7. You make a lot of work about the desert, and Mexico, and the Southwest. Why?

Beginning in my early adolescence, I started a still-unfolding journey across nearly every inch of the US-Mexico border. I was a child in the eastern south, and an adolescent and adult in the western south of this continent – what is or used to be Indigenous lands – Comanche lands, Navajo/Diné, Apache, Hopi, Tewa….

In the desert, between all the many languages, there was a word for everything, for anything. If you could not find it in your own language, you could find someone who would teach it to you in theirs. And muddle up the boundaries of all things in shifting sand. I found many that for the first time described who and what I felt I was.

These are communities who taught me about violence, survival, healing, regeneration, self-definition, and the limits and limitlessness of agency over oneself, and the limits and limitlessness of institutional power over oneself. I am grateful beyond measure.

Intellectually, I’m attracted to borderlands whose friction has yet to resolve. Living in the world, many people seemed convinced of their nationality, identity, and place in time and yet I am fascinated by disruptions to such structures over tens of thousands of years of vibrant human and nonhuman experience.

At night, the desert looks and feels like outer space: stars are lurid as diamonds. The gold in the desert mountains was brought there from distant asteroids. Scratch the surface of the desert, and a glimpse of the cosmos emerges.

Q8. Why is so much of your work about sexual and gender violence?

The body as a location for the latest trends in spacetime? Gender violence is a dynamic of trends being forcibly established, destroyed, and policed by all involved

Invariably, everyone wants to know if “it’s personal” for me. Should it matter? If I had my choice, I’d have been a falcon or a mantis. Some humans, gifted with imagination, have envisioned for themselves ways of being that reach beyond the confines of anatomy or cultural conditioning. I like to spend my time around those ways of being, and it’s reflected in my work.

Oftentimes, those humans are singled out for particularly atrocious persecution. And that’s reflected in my work, too.

Q9. Sometimes I can’t tell what is going on within your work. 

For now.

And I feel the same with yours. And yours. And yours.

There’s a lot of overt and subtle scrutiny about who we love, who we have sex with, and oftentimes that directly affects whether and how and where we get to publish or exhibit or talk about or share our work.  Access to free expression is also a timespace shifting sandstorm

My desire is simply to create a piece in which I openly recognize and represent my own psyche. But sometimes that turns out to be transgressive. I think that happens to almost everyone, and it’s a worthy challenge to keep on expressing your own experience.

Q10. How do you find your sites? And how do you decide to create projects in particular places?

Have you ever been somewhere and for several hours or weeks or maybe several months or even far too many years you gradually begin to see tiny details – things that would almost seem invisible to the casual passer-by? It’s like that. It’s as though my eyes themselves begin to change. And then the rest changes and my eyes stay the same. And yet…

And sooner or later, the unusual and the strange seem like my very oldest friends and adversaries. It’s as though I didn’t find them – they found me.

Q11. You make a lot of work about shamanism and witches, curanderas, brujas, sibyls, spirits. Is there something you want to tell us?

I do not believe in the five senses – I believe in the 25x25x25 senses. I come from a constellation of cultures that do not exactly delineate between the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, and do not police established reality. In brief, I believe in physics and physics agrees that there are more than three dimensions, and more than five senses. So take it up with the scientists.

I’m deeply wedded to a state of being in the brain that, over the centuries, has resulted in both exaltation (as shamans, saints, and holy figures) and condemnation (as defectives, demons, and possessed witches).

Our brain systems are dynamic and elastic, they transform over time and can grant access to transcendental states, altered states, visions, prophecies, and are very adept at navigating the cracks between the confined mundane world and the cosmos…if we keep them agile and brave.

Our global human mythos is built upon the adulation of figures who are godlike, spiritlike, demonlike, witchlike, and we are raised on their exemplar lives from birth (Jesus, the tooth fairy, Baba Yaga, Snow White, La Llorona). Yet at adulthood there is a threshold after which all but a few of us are goaded into becoming unnecessarily mundane humans. It’s perhaps the most occluded crime against humanity.

I’m also interested in how shamanism has been afflicted by control and policing by societies and states.

Q12. Your name is a little unusual. How should I pronounce it? 

Yes. It’s a vestige of the very complicated ancestral broth in which I cooked.

(It sounds something like Kwintin Ah-na Wicks-Woah)

Q13. What are you?

Dust in the wind.

BOOKS & ANTHOLOGIES

A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be – A novel in poetry, with photographs

The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (via the publisher here, or wherever books are sold) – a short story collection in poetry, with photographs

QDA: Queer Disability Anthology / Squares and Rebels (forthcoming, November 2015) – a nonfiction essay

Procession for the Extracted / California College of Arts (forthcoming, November 2015)

Emergency Index / Ugly Duckling Presse

Sonderbauten / Alles Hat Seine Zeit: Rituale gegen das Vergessen // Exhibition Catalogue

One Blood: The Narrative Influence / University of Alaska Press

Schwarzer Tod and the Useless Eaters / Artist Book

SELECTED MAGAZINES

When I Watched Him Hang the Horse / TIN HOUSE MAGAZINE

The Little Kretschmar / TIN HOUSE MAGAZINE

My Nebulae, My Antilles / GULF COAST MAGAZINE

Panevezys Forest / NEW AMERICAN WRITING

All Winter Long the Girls Smoked Tobacco Leaves

SELECTD DVDS

Anguilladae Eaters / Vera Ikon Productions

Anguilladae Eaters / Catalysis Projects

Waterland / DVD