Based in Berlin
How might we use a ‘queering’ tool kit to chimerize our senses of self, embody multiplicity, and become cooperative parts in a larger whole?
Could marginalized, embodied knowledges of transformation expand our collective potential to relate, empathize, and collaborate within a pluriverse – a world-sized chimera?
What new mythologies emerge when we center more-than-human voices?
CHIMERA is an artistic research project and play-based practice that expands notions of body, identity, and other(ness). Rooted in queer ecology, we reappropriate the genre ‘science fantasy’ to co-create on myths of the more-than-human, forging pararealities through speculation and prefiguration. As a collective worldbuilding experiment, we invite our peers into processes of chimerization, challenging the boundaries around the self and repatterning relational intimacies.
Our methodology includes somatic exercises, speculative costuming, avataring/worlding, and more.
Lou Croff Blake & Madelyn Byrd in costume that connects their heads with a 'tube hood,' part of A Tuned Body, 2024.
The Chimera originates in Greek mythology, a fire-breathing beast with the mixed anatomy of lion, goat, and snake; she (yes, female, according to the stories) was divine, descended from the great non-human gods who inhabited the world alongside the Titans. The legend, as told in Homer’s Iliad1, states that the hero Bellapheron, mounted on Pegasus, is ordered by the king of Lycia to slay the Chimera, who has been feeding off local cattle. Her death brought glory to Bellapheron, and Lycia was rid of a predator.
As Le Guin would put it, this, like many popular Greek myths, is a Killer Story2: it is about the spear thrust, and death is its climax. If we reposition the Chimera as protagonist (not hero, but main character), what would Le Guin’s alternative Life Story be? We have a shining mascot of pluralism, subjected to a colonising king’s attempt to tame the wilderness into which his cows wandered. We have yet another story of a non-conforming creature punished for existing.
To become a chimera is not only to acknowledge the pluralities and complexities we contain, it challenges us to change contemporary narratives on queer monstrosity. ‘Queering’ is, perhaps, not only for LGBTQIA2+ people; liberation from learned identity doesn’t always result in a change of pronouns, gayness, or hormone therapy.
1. Homer, The Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-eng1:6.156-6.190
2. Ursula K. Le Guin and Bul Lee, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Revised single edition. ([Gardena, California?]: Cosmogenesis, 2024).
Lou Croff Blake
Lou (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. They collaborate with Madelyn Byrd as the creative duo Chimera.
Madelyn Byrd
Madelyn (they/them, b. 1992, USA) is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator investigating connection, home, biophilia, and the adjascent possible. They collaborate with Lou Croff Blake as the creative duo Chimera.