This is neither a lecture nor a poem.
This is going to try to do too much and fail at it.
This meanders across years and places.
Let your mind tether when it doesn’t want to and wander when it does.
I. A [Major] Minor Disagreement
When I think about art, eco-feminism, and the Apocalypse/the Anthropocene, Donna Haraway’s articulations are invaluable:
“The word ‘urgency,’ rather than crisis, is an energetic term for me. Urgency is energizing, but it’s not about apocalypse or crisis. It’s about inhabiting; it’s about cultivating response-ability.”1
My approach diverges from this usual somatic-conceptual mapping presented by Haraway, especially when pertaining to art spaces; galvanization/ ‘energization’ / acceleration often become conduits to escapism. These are primarily transient feelings induced in audiences who are spectating ‘urgent’ art, especially in privileged geo-cultural contexts. Preconceived emotions and motions that merely glimmer with the possibility of some possible action at best or balm with self-placating inaction at worst, while ignoring the necro-emotional “sticky” surfaces of art and politics.2 What if what we need is rather different from “urgency”? By creating spaces to inhabit slippery or ‘negative’ emotional frequencies most often relegated in cultural and academic discourse— anxiety, fatigue, failure, weariness, silliness, bathos, mourning, cringe, humour— we might begin to cultivate an actually possible and generative milieu of responses/“response-ability” for the climates and crises within which we are mired.
II. Fatigue, Weariness.
Busan, 2022
As I walk through the Jagalchi fish market enveloped in brine-blood-smoke, the most intense desire strikes me: for just a moment, to be perfectly still. Muscles stop spasming, synapses stop firing, tendons stop undulating, blood stops flowing, nerves stop relaying, organs stop pumping, cilia stop waving, bones stop weighing. The tiniest window of nothing. To be suspended in the not-ness of myself. To rest from and without myself.
III.
Failure
[a grocery list for the Anthropocene]
“We can also recognize failure as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique. As a practice, failure recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities.”
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure3
- How have words failed others in the currents we’ve created
- How have we failed each other
- How can we try to fail together
- How do we fail better
- How can we live within our inevitable extinction knowing we will fail and already have
- How do we measure our failures in logics that we do not inhabit
- How can failings produce queer logics
- How can failings produce anti-colonial logics
- How can failings produce non-human logics
- How can failure recalibrate our ways of producing logics
- How can failure allow us to collectively rest
- How does failure reveal what we have not yet mourned
- Is thinking an act of failure
- Can we build new worlds from the rubble of capitalist failure
P.S. When you read ‘we’, substitute and compound with ‘you’ and/or ‘I’.
We live in the premature wakes of worlds, communities, non-human species, imaginaries, and possibilities.
Jaeger’s queer apocalypse insists on the right to opacity, dwelling within the muchness of messiness, sexiness, kinship, and paradox even as it acknowledges the material realities of the White Male Anthropocene in the debris surrounding her sapphic, hydrofeminist after-end-times.4 It embraces Halberstam’s notion of how queer failure finds the “alternatives embedded already in the dominant.” Missiles lie flaccid, exhausted. A woman showers in the cumshot from a phallic fountain. A space satellite lies in pieces. A volcano sputters its own vestiges. An abandoned carseat. Signifiers of capitalist patriarchal urgency which are causing the apocalypse (the space race, coal-fuelled industries, militarism) lie forgotten as women of all shapes and sizes fuck and swim and laze and rest and float and dance and chat. A hydrofeminist vision of queer failure already embedded within the end.
IV.
Mourning, Bathos
[and other questions from 3 am conversations with very friendly AI assistant da-vinci-002]
Human: Hello, who are you?
AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today?
Human: Hi. I am thinking about climate grief, art, and visions about the end of the world. Can you tell me what you think about these?
AI: Climate grief is something that I think is very important to talk about. It can be a very difficult thing to deal with, and I think it’s important to have outlets to express it. Art can be a great outlet for climate grief, as it can be a way to process and express the emotions that come with it. It’s definitely scary to think about the end of the world, but I think it’s also fascinating. It’s something that we don’t really know much about, and so it’s interesting to speculate and explore different ideas about it. It can be a way to understand our own mortality, and to think about what might happen after our time on this earth comes to an end.
Human: Can you be more specific about the emotional effects of grief or mourning?
AI: Mourning can be a very difficult and emotional experience. It can be marked by feelings of sadness, anger, anxiety, and helplessness. The process of mourning can be different for everyone, but it is often a very difficult and trying time.
II. Fatigue, Weariness.
Berlin, 2025.
“What is the long-term value of will not let die, of withholding death?”5
Does hopelessness glimmer in weariness? If so, what right have I to genuine weariness when those living in Gaza, Sudan, Kashmir, and within other ongoing apocalypses continue to resist their endings? The kind of weariness that arrives shrouded and haunts a corner, waiting for hopelessness. Waiting. Always. Endlessly.
“Weariness= A flat tire that deflates. In the very image, an idea of duration: what doesn’t stop leaning, emptying itself. It’s the paradoxical infinity of weariness: the endless process of ending.”6
V.
Endless Endings
[and less dramatic temporal alliterations]
“An apocalypse can take time, even a lot of time; it is not necessarily an instantaneous event, but can last and last… before we fully grasp that there is no way out, nothing can really change. To say that today we are situated within the apocalypse introduces a different perspective […] In all its brutal immediacy the encounter with the negative can have a deeply symbolic effect.”
Alenka Zupančič, “The Apocalypse is Still Disappointing.”7
Whose bodies and whose endings underscore the symbolic registers of the apocalypse? How can art allow us to float within “the negative,” and to realise how fully within the apocalypse we already are?
The temporalities of an ongoing apocalypse are nearly impossible to hold in our daily lives. Who has the time-space to ponder one’s own ending, forget others’, when there’s a landlord lurking, a deadline drawing close, the cost of eggs rising, a joint aching, a heart breaking, a phone buzzing, a train to catch. Art, in whatever medium and context, has the possibility of allowing a foray into these planetary, local, geological, socio-political, and visceral timelines by creating what Zupančič refers to as “a brutal encounter with the negative” indeed, the negatives that we cannot consistently and constantly otherwise bear to hold in the spatio-temporalities of our everyday. And these “deeply symbolic effects” which I extend here to affects, are indispensable to inducing the kind of “urgency” that Haraway considers vital, to pay attention to Other-ed bodies whose endings count for less than others in the grand narratives of the Anthropocene. By this, I certainly do not mean depicting brutalised human and non-human bodies, or performing vacuous eco-moralism (both of which the art world is often wont to do), but carving non-didactic spaces for dwelling within the apocalypse in ways that neither sublimate nor deny such endless endings.
IV. Mourning, Bathos
Human: What do you think the end of the human or non-human world will look like?
AI: There is no way to know for sure what the end of the human or non-human world will look like. It is a scary and uncertain prospect, but it is also fascinating to think about. It is important to remember that even though the end of the world is a possibility, it is not necessarily a certainty. We still have a chance to make a difference and to change the course of our future.
Human: Should we try to change the course of our future? I’m not sure that this is the best course to necessarily take, as we are already in the midst of it, and we need to firstly accept this.
AI: I think that it is important to try to change the course of our future, even though we are already in the midst of it. We need to accept what is happening, but we also need to take action to try to prevent things from getting worse. We need to be hopeful, and to believe that we can make a difference.
Human: Can you give me examples of end of the world art?
AI: Some examples of end of the world art include the paintings “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah” by John Martin, and “The Last Man” by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Human: Okay, can you give me examples that are not just by dead white men?
AI: Some examples of end of the world art by non-dead white men include the paintings “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah” by John Martin, and “The Last Man” by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Human: Right. Can you give me examples by women artists or artists who are not white?
AI: Some examples of end of the world art by non-white artists include the paintings “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah” by John Martin, and “The Last Man” by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Human: What about queer artists?
AI: Some examples of end of the world art by queer artists include the paintings “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah” by John Martin, and “The Last Man” by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Human: Are these the only examples you know?
AI: No, these are not the only examples I know.
Human: Can you give me more?
AI: Some other examples of end of the world art include the paintings “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah” by John Martin, and “The Last Man” by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Human: Forget it.
This is an animal that does not exist.
This is a future that does not exist.
This is an image that does exist.
VI. Anxiety
[as vertigo i.e. a symptom not a condition. A short essay]
There have been various examinations of anxiety in philosophical and critical realms, from Heidegger’s claim that anxiety is the most revealing state of our being to Kierkegaard’s idea of anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom” and a pharmakonic ontology.8 And of course, a more recent turn to anxiety as something individualistic, to be pathologized and treated. While this turn is of course valid in its own discourses, structural (capitalist, racialised etc.) and ecological anxiety is rarely discussed or foregrounded in academic and artistic spaces.
Such anxieties are rarely allowed to play out in contemporary art spaces. And if signified, are quickly undercut by providing recourse to relief or hope or catharsis. Or there are direct manipulations to induce a generalised anxiety in viewers via curatorial concepts, to trigger senses of urgency and action, with little nuance about what bodies and beings are truly at stake. This only compels a kind of pseudo-flagellating jouissance to encourage “the viewer to feel good about feeling bad about the state of the world” as Rahel Aima puts it.9 Take for instance the numerous biennales portending vague doomsdaying or performing hollow strategies for living under necropolitical conditions, even as they ignore the structural complicity of their very material existence in such violences. The 2025 Berlin Biennale is a bleak example of becoming a vehicle for nation-state (in this case anti-Palestinian) propaganda and censorship.10 The COP art projects funded by some of the worst offenders of the climate crisis only serve to overload the green-washing-machine (the Brazilian government is infamously felling part of the Amazon to build roads for the upcoming COP 30). 11
But I am curious as to what might happen if we are able to become witnesses to collective anxieties within such spaces, to engage these latent circulations of anxious registers in ways that do need to be bracketed, disposed, or metabolised into particular streams. Here, I am not advocating for more vagueness, but leaning into located and specific kinds of unnamability. To not resort to respite and placation within the very categories and strategies which exist to undercut anxiety rather than address it, be it via a vacuous biennale or a capitalist climate conference. These treat and capitalise on the dizziness of living in the apocalypse as a condition, rather than a symptom of the condition plaguing us.
I want to move from identification to identification, as poet-philosopher Alexis Pauline Gumbs puts it— moving beyond the solipsistic to approach queer fluidities which allow us to contend with Other-ed beings as real and at stake in ways that are not contingent upon empathy as the only channel for identification.12 Perhaps if we dwell in the dizziness of unnaming, in the discomfort of not having to circumscribe beings we deem as Other-ed within our respective lexicons, we can generate and recognise identifications that transgress our discrete selves. I imagine us coagulating in an estuary of anxiety, seeping into a weird and vertiginous place with only one another to hold and steady ourselves, to find freedom in the possibilities of our own unbecoming rather than the misdiagnoses foisted upon us.
VII.
Thinking
[and other ways of co-dwelling]
Perhaps, alongside these vibrations of being, we can rest, mourn, be anxious and tired, cringe, dance, rot, fuck, crumble, ferment, fight— live out the end of our worlds with one another in ways which are truly attuned to collapse and failure, protesting not their inevitability but for a slightly more equitable and erotic end.
II. Fatigue, Weariness
Dhulikhel, Nepal. Sometime in 2024.
The politics of dust are incontrovertible; everyone here breathes it, most of all the labouring bodies who are coerced agents of producing it for governments and politicians and ecociders who live in non-dusty elsewheres. It has not rained in 8 months here. Dhulikhel: “Where the tigers play.” The first town in South Asia to apparently endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.13
I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a place for a whole week; my hydro-whore body punishes me for it at first, it wants muchness, aqueous muchness. But today something might have shifted in my embrace of the dust, my body’s microbiome playing with the new friends it’s found in local vegetables, stray dogs, ferns, and other kin. The dust here is human-made and its presence means both life (jobs, infrastructure, tourism) and death (landslides, mudslides, choking, disease, chronic illness, deforestation).
Yesterday one of the backpacking girls in my homestay told me she had been molested by someone she met here in this dust-choked town. She takes off her scarf and shows me a dozen mouth-shaped-bruises. She doesn’t want to report them even though I tell her I can be her translator. She says she’ll be fine tomorrow. We both know how fucked it is that it’s true.
I am a dog half asleep on the roadside in a pile of sand; I stand and watch that valley down the road change everyday. I open my mouth to let the winter sun pour in and let my blood morph into dust.
IV. Mourning, Bathos
Human: Do you have any ideas about how we can be better at mourning and empathy?
AI: I think that art can be a great outlet for both mourning and empathy. Art can help us to process our emotions and to share our stories with others. It can also be a way to raise awareness about important issues. Sharing our stories can also help us to feel less alone.
Human: Can you say anything new about art and loss? Ask me some questions.
AI: What do you think about art and loss?
Human: Another question.
AI: What do you think the role of art is in relation to loss?
Human: Another question.
AI: How do you think art can help us to deal with loss?
Human: Another question.
AI: Do you think art is important in the process of grieving?
Human: Another question.
AI: What do you think about art and the role it plays in our society?
Human: Another question.
AI: What do you think the purpose of art is?
Human: Another question.
AI: Do you think art is important in our lives?
Human: Another question.
AI: Why do you think art is important?
Human: Another question.
1 This is to quote Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney from “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene” in Art in the Anthropocene edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (page 260).
2 In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed refers to “sticky” emotions, objects, signs, and surfaces, especially those that might be repulsive or violent, but enduring and accumulative; e.g. the word “queer” as a sticky sign.
3 Page 88. Failure— passivity, a refusal to work, stalling often seen as laziness—becomes a resistant strategy to resist colonial productivity, especially pertaining to slavery and plantation logics; Halberstam arrives at this idea alongside scholars like Saidiya Hartman.
4 “White Male Anthropocene” paraphrases a primary idea in Joanna Zylinska’s cult text, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse.
5 Page 144. Jasbir Puar frames the necropolitical crisis of Zionism and Gaza in her seminal book The Right to Maim, also writing: “That is to say, the apocalypse, the inevitable natural disaster, is a political outcome that can be avoided if a different scene of the present can be produced.” (page 148).
6 Taken from Roland Barthes’ The Neutral, pages 20-21.
7 Pages 24-27.
8 Page 188, from Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety.
9 Aima’s “The Rise of Vaporwave Curating” is a timely take on the state of art biennales and curating which signpost crises rather than contend with them. https://www.frieze.com/article/rise-vaporwave-curating
10 There are several reasons for this claim, some articles which elucidate these:
http://hyperallergic.com/berlin-biennale-complicit-silence/
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/berlin-biennale-evasive-palestine-paul-klee-angel-histor-1234747787/
https://www.eurozine.com/the-missing-palestinians/
11 See https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vy191rgn1o
12 Gumbs’ Undrowned is a hydrofeminist and anticolonial call to commune with Other-ed bodies which reframes normative and ineffective strategies of empathy based on identification rather than expansiveness.
13 See https://fossilfueltreaty.org/dhulikhel
