by Cynthia Ling Lee
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I wrote “a body that is land and sea” during the creative process for Oceanic, an artistic collaboration with micha cárdenas, Gerald Casel, Huy Truong, Susana Ruiz, Ian Costello, and Anna Friz. Combining performance, film, and augmented reality, Oceanic asks how we collectively move through the loss of beloved people, places, and our own physical capacities in a time of COVID-19 and climate chaos to collectively conjure BIPOC worlds of queer joy, access intimacy, and trans liberation. The project takes inspiration from the work of queer, chronically ill Chicanx feminist, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the site of Natural Bridges State Beach on Amah Mutsun land, colonially known as Santa Cruz, California. My writing, which is simultaneously a poem and a score for movement improvisation, was written in response to Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals. King uses the shoal – a geologic formation that is neither land nor sea — to theorize exchanges between Black and Native studies. Without, I hope, displacing the central importance of King’s original argument, my poem emerged from felt resonances between her description of the shoal’s shifting, unfixed, in-between qualities and the unstable and precarious nature of my crip body, my queer propensities for gender and sexual fluidity, and my diasporic be/longings as the child of Taiwanese immigrants, who are island people. The images that accompany “a body that is land and sea” are video stills from our experimental film, Oceanic: Queering the Ocean, and feature cinematography by Huy Truong and Susana Ruiz.
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Cynthia’s bio and photo