Convivial Acts for an Ecosensual Labyrinth

Abstract

This paper addresses queer conviviality across Crab & Bee’s “Plymouth Labyrinth” project (2018–19); a 6-month activity including group walks, ritual sharings, group readings, postal art, poetry groups, site-specific dance, exhibition and making workshops. Based around convivial web-walking, the account examines how, through spinning out of collaborations and unfolding new forms, a web of work and activity was generated to support intensity and connectivity. The paper attends to queer aspects of conviviality, such as attention to unhuman partners, becoming-animal, simultaneity/plateauing in haecceity, dispersals of subjectivity and relations of threads (lines of desire) to web making.

Keywords:

• Conviviality
• ecosensuality
• fictioning
• haecceity
• web walking
• world building

Notes

1 “Labyrinth” in this context draws from the suggestion by Nicolai and Wenzel (2012) that the story of the labyrinth does not originate from a construction under Knossos, but from the bewildering structure of the city itself seen through the eyes of nomadic visitors. We chose to use this idea as a lens through which to view Plymouth and to disrupt from the city’s clichéd narratives, such as those of the Spanish Armada & the Blitz.

2 This action was informed by Patrica MacCormack’s galvanisation to form a “pact with the pack” as an opportunity for “demonological activism” and for “the philosopher to put their body where their pen is” (MacCormack, 2014, n.p.). MacCormack, in turn, is galvanized by Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of “Becoming Animal” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, pp. 29–44).