Monika Janulevičiūtė and Celyn June
The Switchblade Grassland, 11’, 2018

The Switchblade Grassland Highway cut across the dwelling. Generally, the Mundane, the Uneventful would be perceived as some kind of string, a filler towards more obvious instances, occasions, singular happenings. There is an ambition to look closely, hover above and avoid being ultimately guided by entertainment. Everything is still ringing, droning when you are not looking, when you are upstairs or away — nothing is asleep or empty.

The Switchblade Grassland was created by Monika Janulevičiūtė in close collaboration with the musician Celyn June. This film is a part and extension of Celyn June’s release called Portion Park (W-I, 2018). Monika Janulevičiūtė is an artist and graphic designer working on broad spectrum of projects, that usually explore realities and belonging.

Miša Skalskis
Honey for Blood, 17’, 2019

The work depicts the misadventure of a teenager, stuck on an isolated island with their parents. The journey is aggravated further by the misfortune of being alive in the middle of climate calamity when the sun — an evil force — is about to melt everything solid.

Miša Skalskis is a visual and sound artist based in Helsinki. His works range from sound pieces to video work and publications. Skalskis’ latest works explore autobiographical modes of narration, anguished states of remembrance and nostalgia, and the relationship these have to fiction. 

April Lin
Digital Traces, 18’, 2019

Death is something that all beings experience, perhaps the one universal thing that unites all living things: across species, structures, and space. And yet, there remains a public hesitancy to engage with it, an implicit framing of death as something to approach as a tragedy, only ever accepted as the inevitable consequence of old age. At the same time, we are surrounded by death, especially as news of violence, illness, and conflict spreads within the digitalised and globalised world with increasing immediacy. Join me as I delve into the intimate intertwinings of technology with death, gently investigating its past(s), present(s), and future(s).

April Lin 林森 is an artist-filmmaker and videographer investigating the pluralities of truths as constructed, contained, and disseminated via image-making. Merging experimental techniques with a commitment to centring marginalised knowledges, they approach the moving image as a tool — to remember forgotten pasts, honour erased presents, and imagine new futures.

The Institute of Queer Ecology
The Emergence, 16’, 2020

Metamorphosis is a 3-part proposal by the Institute of Queer Ecology to restructure how the world is imagined and how it operates today. These three stages are modeled after the life cycles of holometabolous insects: bugs who undergo a “complete metamorphosis” where the organism fully restructures itself to adapt to its changing needs and ensure its survival. The Emergence is a third part of the video series. Building off of José Esteban Muñoz’s notions of a Queer Utopia, lessons learned through Emergent Strategy (Adrienne Maree Brown), and the concept of the Capitalocene (as articulated by Jason W. Moore, Raj Patel, Naomi Klein, and many others), Metamorphosis presses us to imagine with more ambition what could emerge from this multifaceted crisis.

Queerness, we claim, is a strategy as important as imagination, rooted as it is in a history of establishing alternative worlds of mutual support and care that bloom in the spaces underneath and between this one.

A body breaks down and a new one forms from the same material. 

This change comes from within.

The Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), is a collaborative, decentralized organism that works to imagine and realize an equitable multispecies future. With interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating exhibitions and directly producing artworks/projects, the Institute of Queer Ecology lays the groundwork for a (bio)diverse utopia.