“Time is a mother.”

- Ocean Vuong, “Not Even”

“I’m always out of step with the clock of the historical.”

- Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

*Time As Relative* at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, September 16 - October 22, 2022.

The concept of time is familiar to everyone. We use the term to describe and organize our ways of being. Time refers to a sequence of events, a method of measurement, an individual period or set of periods. In general, time is a dimension that we use to measure our existence. Because of this, we assume that time has been a constant fixture in our lives. But although humans have assessed the passage of time since time immemorial, the ways in which our lives are structured based on time is a relatively recent construct. In a deep dive into the history of time, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli explains that while timekeeping devices such as sundials and clepsydras (water clocks) existed in ancient times, these “did not play the cruel role that clocks do today in the organization of our lives.”[1] Clockwork temporality is organized through specific mechanisms that shape its outcomes.

Time as we know it is a direct result of colonialism. Before Western contact, the passage of time was understood through the positioning of stars, the sun’s course, and the moon’s phases. Time was interconnected with agriculture and spirituality and marked by ceremonies and ritual practices.[2] Time existed in multiplicity. The violence of colonization distorted or altogether removed these methods in favour of a general means of keeping time.

Rovelli identifies that the clock’s governance of time began in the fourteenth century through the development of colonial cities and villages. A crucial component for these communities was a central church within the city centre. Each church had its own bell tower and large clock overlooking the towns while regulating time for work and prayer.[3] In 1582, the Gregorian calendar, as introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, replaced the Julian calendar to regulate a fixed time for Easter. These reformations of time gave the Church the power to implement religious morals within the structures of time, controlling how we spend our lives collectively.

Time was further systematized in the nineteenth century with the expansion of national and international interconnectivity. Until then, each city regulated time individually; however, the invention of railroads and telegraphs required a universal standardization of time. These developments led to the formation of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in 1884 and our current configuration of global time zones. The Industrial Revolution and avances in technology and travel further oriented time towards progress, productivity, and modernity.

Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith astutely explains, “Ideas about progress are grounded within ideas and reorientations toward time and space.”[4] This linear and progressive perspective on time also reinforces the Western retelling of history, one that situates the past as “primitive,” the present as something to “cease,” and the future as “distant.” Smith acknowledges how this approach to time affects social life. She continues by saying that “[d]eeply embedded in these constructs are systems of classification and representation which lend themselves easily to binary oppositions, dualisms and hierarchical orderings of the world.”[5]

“It is no coincidence that around this time, the concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were first defined. One of the most notable social constructs formed by these perspectives is the progression expected of humans to lead what society considers an accomplished life.”

It is no coincidence that around this time, the concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were first defined.[6] One of the most notable social constructs formed by these perspectives is the progression expected of humans to lead what society considers an accomplished life. The human life cycle, which consists of birth, adolescence, marriage, reproduction, child-rearing, and death (in that sequence), also known as the circle of life, is one that must be passed down through inheritance and repeated forever. This heteronormative construct of social time is the driving force in much of Western contemporary culture.

Queer theorist Jack Halberstam considers this “reproductive, biological, generational” perspective on time as “straight time.”[7] This temporality has produced substructures such as the nuclear family, monogamy, and heteropatriarchy, all of which shape the current and dominant social formations of time. Those who do not follow life’s linear progression or meet its milestones accordingly are seen as existing outside of time. For them, Halberstam proposes the theory of “queer time,” a temporality imbued with the “potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child-rearing.”[8]

While queer temporality may be helpful to some, for others, it may form an unintentional binary with straight time, posing a choice to decide on one or the other. The relationship of 2SLBTQIA+ individuals to family often holds more nuance, particularly in Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latine, and other racialized cultures where familial and ancestral ties are as important an aspect of one’s identity as gender and sexuality. Current queer theories on time seem to largely falter to Western misconceptions of family, thereby enforcing the division between queerness and family.

Thinking about time as familial is not uncommon. Historically, time has often been personified through the lens of patriarchy. Tropes like “Father Time,” objects like grandfather clocks, and phrases like “time waits for no man” gender time through a masculine lens. Recently, Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong has challenged this notion in his recent collection of poems entitled Time Is a Mother (2022). The book is a rumination on the passing of his mother and the passage of time felt through this particular form of grief. In his poem “Not Even,” Vuong identifies himself amidst linear time within the poem’s first three lines: “Hey / I was a fag now I’m a checkbox / The pen tip jabbed in my back, I feel the mark of progress.”[9] The poem sets off with nostalgia, recalling who the poet “used to be” and who he is now. As time feels heavier, Vuong uses the eloquent and daring metaphor, “Time is a mother.” As the poem intensifies with the grief he feels after the passing of his mother, he expands, “Time is a motherfucker” (Vuong’s italics). In a conversation with writer Glennon Doyle, Vuong explained his views on time, saying, “to me, [time] was a mother because it gives birth to all things. The present is a capacious moment. The present mothers us. Every moment in the present is the womb holding life. To me, time is more mother than probably anything I’ve ever known.”[10]

Imagining time as a mother allows for different relationalities to form. While matriarchs are often assigned to the role of motherhood, the act of mothering or maternal care is not exclusive to the mother-child bond. It is important to acknowledge that these relationships may be distanced, absent, or impossible to foster. The act of mothering, as a means of care and nurture, may be performed by other family members, friends, and even strangers. Mothering may also occur internally when caring for one’s inner child. The work of mothering oneself, or the psychological work of resolving issues from the past to enable showing up for oneself in the present, is in itself a unique temporal effort. [11]

Billy-Ray Belcourt, “NDN HOMO SONNET,” 2019

In the poem “NDN HOMO SONNET,” writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt situates his queerness and Indigenous identity within motherhood. He states, “Mathematically / speaking, an NDN homo is a metaphysical conundrum. / Put differently, I am a mother before all else.”[12] Belcourt generously provides meaning and gravity to each term. Belcourt, who is from the Driftpile Cree Nation, situates “an NDN,” a shorthand term used by Indigenous peoples of North America, also sometimes used as an acronym for “Not dead Native,” as an “ellipsis of a nation”—an ellipsis being an omission or absence, here in the settler colonial project known as Canada. He continues, “a homo is a yearning,” here referencing theorist José Esteban Muñoz, one of Belcourt’s intellectual forebears, who made the daring provocation of queerness as a potentiality of the “not-yet” here.[13]

Belcourt expands on his statement of being a mother by referencing writer Maggie Nelson’s analysis of motherhood as conceived by French theorist Emmanuel Levinas.[14] Levinas poses motherhood as the ethical responsibility of caring for the other, often beyond the freedom of the individual self.[15] In her book On Freedom, Nelson reflects on this viewing of motherhood as the model for selflessness by unpacking its feminized and racialized history, ultimately concluding that the idea of mothering “can and should circulate apart of the maternal body and ties.”[16] Earlier this year I asked Belcourt about his views on mothering and recall him addressing motherhood as a mystery, but also as beyond child care and moreover as a means of protection from harm.[17]

In “NDN HOMO SONNET,” Belcourt is positioned in relation to a lover, one “pulling apart the mouth of a planet” and one who finds Belcourt’s “living [as] the sound of an emptying.” Beyond the erotic, there is inherent violence. This lover is identified as a dancer—a timekeeper trained in maintaining the tempo of this peculiar relationship that they have commenced. Yet Belcourt remains within his own temporality, his own season. As he states, even after death, “it will still be autumn in [his] body.” Throughout the poem, Belcourt offers different metrics and dimensions like “the size of the world,” “God’s palm,” and even “death,” which pulls the poem beyond the present moment, even though the poet himself is navigating through feelings of the present moment; the poem is within time as much as it is outside of it.

In deeming the poem a sonnet, Belcourt poses his writing to a follow particular structure within poetry. Sonnets are fourteen-line poems, often about desire, and traditionally written in iambic pentameter. While Belcourt’s poem assumes the length of the sonnet, it bypasses the limits of pentameter structure and its formal rhyming scheme, instead opting for its own rhythm and tempo. Conceptually, thematically, and formally, “NDN HOMO SONNET” flows beyond the structures of time.

**Lucas LaRochelle, QT.bot: Sitting with you in the future, 2019**

Artist and designer Lucas LaRochelle has been exploring timelessness and the possibilities of navigating relational queer memory via their ongoing project, Queering the Map (QTM). Started in 2017, QTM is “a community counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relationship to physical space.”[18] It is structured as a website where one can pin a submission on a specific location anywhere in the world. The submissions can vary from moments of joy to violence, inside jokes, and other forms of queer lived experience.

“QTM has no search functions, no profiles or accounts. All entries are anonymous. This format allows for submissions to exist in multiples, in that they could have been written by me, you, and/or someone else.”

The QTM platform suggests an existence outside the normative flows of time. A distinctive feature of this archive is that there are no timestamps or markers for when submissions are added. QTM has no search functions, no profiles or accounts. All entries are anonymous. This format allows for submissions to exist in multiples, in that they could have been written by me, you, and/or someone else. This format suggests an absence of time; however, this suspicion is immediately overwhelmed by the abundance of over 82,000 submissions imbued with a range of temporal possibilities.

Submissions are written in the past, present, and future tense. Some may be distant memories, others may be recent experiences, and the rest could be mere speculations or fantastical projections. LaRochelle calls this temporal unfolding a “pulling-of-the-past-in-the-present-as-a-means-of-affecting-the-future.”[19] The memories shared through this platform have an investment in the future. In QTM, the past, present, and future collide, forming an infinity loop of sorts that best represents the feeling of remembering. Another way of thinking about QTM is as an archive of memory, where everything is happening all at once.[20]

In 2019, LaRochelle conceived QT.bot, an artificial intelligence machine learning robot that takes fragments from submissions on QTM to form new possibilities. QT.bot breaks up language, tenses, and sense and puts the act of queering into practice. QT.bot follows in phenomenologist Sara Ahmed’s notion of queering, which sees queer as an action instead of a fixed identity. In this sense, queer is a verb or something that is done rather than something someone is.[21] QT.bot is a means of further queering Queering the Map. Rather than using AI to make sense of QTM’s stories, QT.bot further complicates and distorts them. The texts produced range from emotional to absurd, often within the same output. QT.bot inadvertently participates in the inherently queer practice of cut-up poetry, following in the aleatory poetic lineage of writers such as William Burroughs, Walt Whitman, and Kathy Acker, to name a few. Sitting with you in the future is QT.bot’s first output, a collection of speculations selected by LaRochelle that are displayed as prints.

LaRochelle’s relationship to their work is rooted in familial relationships. When I asked LaRochelle about their works, they acknowledged: “Queering the Map is my daddy; I am the mother of QT.bot.”[22] This familial association offers an alternative means of relating to AI. By identifying as QT.bot’s mother, LaRochelle commits to taking responsibility for QT.bot. One example can be seen in LaRochelle ultimately deciding which of QT.bot’s thousands of outputs should be made public. QT.bot has been described as “an anarchist in the archive,” one that is “facilitating the destruction of a world that does not work.”[23]

As QT.bot’s mother, LaRochelle has their work cut out for them. During a recent presentation, LaRochelle admitted that QT.bot’s texts can be at once charming and downright hateful. The AI has no ethical relation to the world. While that may be true, through mothering, LaRochelle assumes an ethical relation to QT.bot. This relational bond is deeper than mere programming. LaRochelle’s maternal ties to QT.bot stem from their own experiences working with QTM. As its most consistent moderator, LaRochelle understands the overload feeling of filtering through and making sense of QTM’s submissions personally.[24] Through a means of bot-rearing, LaRochelle will pass down their knowledge to their AI until it is ready to behave on its own and play with others. [25]

**Kama La Mackerel, Trans Affirmations, 2019**

Multidisciplinary artist Kama La Mackerel’s practice approaches time in a way that flourishes outside of Western frameworks. When I spoke with the artist earlier this year, I was reminded that they make the distinction in their work as being ancestral before defining it as queer. To La Mackerel, what Western history understands as “queer,” here being the former pejorative that was reclaimed in the 1990s and currently describes the culmination of fluid and non-heteronormative genders and sexualities, is not a recent or new concept for Indigenous and other non-Western cultures. Along with La Mackerel, Indigenous artists and scholars such as Dan Taulapapa McMullin and Yuki Kihara have acknowledged that queer perspectives and identities existed long before the gay rights movement and colonization.[26]

If La Mackerel’s work is read as queer, it is only so because it is first and foremost decolonial. La Mackerel, who was born in the plantation island of Mauritius, actively works against colonial silences formed by the histories affecting their familial lineages.[27] La Mackerel knows that the past holds knowledges lost due to colonialism. Through their practice, they grasp fragments of the past, accessing and activating what has been passed down generationally, and bringing these into the present as a method for nourishing new futures.

In addition to their family structure, La Mackerel belongs to a rich lineage of trans femmes of colour who have shaped and continue to transform art, literature, and activism.[28] These generations are foregrounded in the textile installation Trans Affirmations, consisting of three banners that boldly proclaim: PROTECT TRANS YOUTH; REMEMBER TRANS POWER; and LOVE FOR TRANS WOMEN OF COLOUR. These banners invoke those who are here, were always here, and will be here hereafter. They merge the past, present, and future, collapsing time to acknowledge the strength and brilliance of trans femmes of colour. The message is loud and concise.

“For centuries trans voices have been marginalized and subjugated by hegemonic histories, even though they are often at the frontlines of political movements. Together, these banners assemble an ancestry for trans femmes, one interconnected by kinship.”

For centuries trans voices have been marginalized and subjugated by hegemonic histories, even though they are often at the frontlines of political movements. Together, these banners assemble an ancestry for trans femmes, one interconnected by kinship. In this act of remembrance, La Mackerel assumes the inheritance of trans power and accepts their role as an ancestor to actively build better futures for trans generations to come.
These affirmations of empowerment are inscribed with acrylic paint on vibrant stretches of silk fabric. The materiality of banners holds a deeper maternal meaning for the artist. The banners are made from silk saris that once belonged to La Mackerel’s mother and were gifted to them.[29] In their artist’s statement, La Mackerel sees this familial inheritance as a marker for “inter-generational forgiveness, accountability, acceptance and love.”[30] Trans Affirmations depicts a decolonial poetics of love that is possible between lineages of all forms within the fabrics of space and time.

Arielle Twist, ASTAM, 2019

In the installation ASTAM, artist and writer Arielle Twist depicts the topics of sex, kinship, and hunger through the dynamics of trans and Indigenous familial relationalities. Astam, a Nehiyawewin word for “come here,” is an invitation, a provocation, and a call to be together.[31] The photographs in the installation illustrate a gathering of the artist’s siblings around a feast of berries as a means of commensality. To build sibling care and intimacy, Twist discusses what may be taboo topics between family, like sex and sexuality.

In their essay on how queer and trans Indigenous artists view sex, Cree-Métis-Saulteaux scholar Jas M. Morgan explains that “sex is ceremony. Sex is a healing kind of magic honouring anti-identitarian, anti-capitalist, and anarchic conceptions of fluid gender, truth, and complicated, beautiful, terrifying, world-changing sex.”[32] Morgan continues their profound view of sex when explaining that “[s]ex is a communion with self, with our own bodies, which we offer to others in humility like we do sage, sweetgrass and tobacco.”[33] These views expand beyond the predominant thinking of sex as only intended for reproduction and provide a more holistic understanding for youth to consider. Having these dialogues shared between siblings demonstrates a bond built on trust and respect. What is conveyed is a strengthening of their generation. Here, Twist highlights how sibling dialogue can also be another form of nurture.

The Western construct of the nuclear family assumes that child-rearing is the task of the two household parents and, in doing so, ignores the fact that raising youth is a communal effort. In the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, botanist and poet Robin Wall Kimmener challenges the construct of the nuclear family further by suggesting that child-rearing can occur beyond human interaction. When thinking about her upbringing, Kimmener credits strawberries as integral to how she was raised.[34] To Kimmener, the ripening of wild strawberries was a lesson in patience, gift giving, and nourishment. Strawberries are also essential food and medicine. In Twist’s feast, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and braids of sweetgrass are displayed in abundance for her siblings to consume with pleasure.

The setting that Twist creates for her portraits collapses the sense of past, present, and future. In the curatorial essay for the exhibition Let’s Talk about Sex, BB, which featured ASTAM, curators Erin Sutherland and Carina Magazzeni acknowledge the “fluctuating temporality” within Twist’s work.[35] The endless black background and contrast lighting reference baroque and chiaroscuro aesthetics typically associated with European paintings. Yet, there at the centre is Twist’s Two-Spirit sibling in their youth, feasting in timelessness.

An accompanying poem composed by Twist ruminates on her role as an Indigenous trans Two-Spirit matriarch. The artist considers the responsibilities she assumes and the hunger for the type of mothering she intends to enact. Much like strawberries, which ripen first among berries during harvest season, Twist bears fruit in the form of poetry and art that anticipate more and others are yet to come.

**Léuli Eshrāghi, Re(cul)naissance, 2020**

Artist, writer, and curator Léuli Eshrāghi is aware of the need to remember ancestral ways of being. As both a researcher and someone affected by the violences of colonial research, Eshrāghi understands how time can forget, yet the body remembers. Eshrāghi, who has Samoan, Persian, and other ancestries, is also fa‘afafine, a gender identity specific to the Great Ocean archipelago.[36] Centuries of anthropological attempts to describe fa‘afaine, filtered through the masculinist perspectives of researchers such as Margaret Mead, led to the flattening of their ways of being.

In the video Re(cul)naissance, Eshrāghi and kin partake in the multiplicities of reconnection They stand bare chested and outfitted in undergarments designed by the clothing brand babylikestopony and hand-printed ʻie lavalava draping their lower bodies. These fabrics are adorned with iridescent motifs that are both ancestral and new. Fa‘afafine, fa‘atane/faʻatama, and other bodies are softly massaged; subjects caress one another’s skin with care and tenderness. Here, desire and pleasure are celebrated between “cumlines,” a term Eshrāghi uses to describe “sexual and spiritual genealogies.”[37] The looping of the video and the recurrence of the acts performed suggest a break with linearity and an embrace of cyclical and continuous connectivity.

Re(cul)naissance, meaning “stepping back,” is a play on words and reworking of the French term renaissance, or rebirth.[38] In their artist’s statement, Eshrāghi asks the following questions:

What do kink practices have to do with non-colonial Indigenous actions in the world? What does receiving and giving tactile pleasure have to do with mutual consent, respect and care in queer Indigenous kinships, beyond taboos imposed by Western missionaries and militourist/settler colonial agents? What does touch and sensing the world through embodied knowledge, softness, hardness, fluid states, openness, closedness teach us about how we might make worlds after Gregorian shame-time?[39]

Eshrāghi believes that we are in the grips of Gregorian shame-time, which is how they term the capitalist, colonial, and religious hold on time and its “compulsory heteropatriarchal” paradigm.[40] Gregorian shame-time centres the colonization of our bodies, minds, spirits, and sexualities. Indigenous, Black, and Brown bodies are made to feel shame for not being desirable or good enough in comparison to whiteness.[41] This deep shame becomes trauma that gets passed down generationally. In response to this, Eshrāghi proposes “rimming time,” a play on words on Island rims and the act of analingus. Rimming time recentres time within Indigenous pleasures outside of the bounds of the Church and other oppressive colonial means.[42] This return to time, formed by pleasure and intimacy and guided by principles of consent and care, allows for new possibilities of relationality to form.

The lexicon of time

The title of this exhibition, Time as Relative, is both a statement and a metaphor. It is a reminder of the generally agreed upon theory of relativity, which states that time is relative to one’s experience. Time can also be personified as a relative. Time can be familial, maternal, kindred, and ancestral. As seen in these works, there is an underlying temporal connection between time and poetry. Writer, musician, and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson finds poetry in all its forms to be “ancient stories echoing into the future from the present. […] [P]oetry holds space for other worlds.”[43] Similarly, in his review of the order of time, Carlo Rovelli remarks that “perhaps poetry is another of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the invisible.”[44]

The artists in this exhibition are all writers and academics in their own right, and have a deep understanding of time, language, and its constructs. Poets are not only writers but observers; in ancient times poets were astrologers.[45] They process the gravity of time, its dimensions, fragility, and its complicated beauty in unique and meaningful ways. Working through the intricacies of family dynamics allows for encounters with generational strength and ancestral resilience.
These works are examples of how time can exist outside of the paradigm of compulsory heteropatriarchy and by and large Western and colonial structures of the family. Recent and ongoing events like the COVID-19 pandemic have shown us how these relatively recent formations of time are built on shaky grounds. This exhibition reminds us that both family and time are fluid. Also apparent is that Indigenous, and queer, trans, and non-binary artists who work within the structures of time and family are dreaming of different ways of rebuilding them anew.

Hanss Lujan Torres is an artist, researcher and curator from Cusco, Peru, working between the unceded territories of the Syilx/Okanagan Nation and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of British Columbia Okanagan (2012) and is currently working to complete an MA in Art History at Concordia University.

His research and curatorial practice consider subjugated archives, queer temporalities, and alternative futures in contemporary art. Hanss is the research coordinator for the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. In addition, he has worked with several arts organizations in British Columbia, including Oxygen Art Centre, the Lake Country Art Gallery, Two Rivers Gallery, the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Notes

1. Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 59.

2. This is a rather general summarization of time before colonization, but I make it from the fragments of histories I encountered growing up in Cusco, Peru. Ceremonies like Inti Raymi, or the ceremony of the sun that happens on winter solstice, and ritual stones like Intihuatana, suggest that time was marked by the stars and the sun’s passing.

3. Rovelli, Order of Time , 59.

4. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples , 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 1999), 53.

5. Ibid.

6. The terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were proposed in 1869 by Austro-Hungarian journalist Karoly Maria Kertbeny. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality , vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978); David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

7. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2004), xi.

8. Ibid.

9. Ocean Vuong, “Not Even,” in Time Is a Mother (New York: Cape Poetry, 2022), 45–51.

10. Quoted in “Mothers & Sons with Ocean Vuong (and Case Melton),” We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle (podcast), April 5, 2022, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mothers-sons-with-ocean-vuong-and-chase-melton/id1564530722?i=1000556261871.

11. Much of this thinking comes from the second season of the Netflix series Russian Doll, created by Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland (New York: Netflix, 2022).

12. Billy-Ray Belcourt, “NDN HOMO SONNET,” in NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto: CNIB, 2019), 38

13. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 26.

14. PNCA Live Video, Maggie Nelson Lecture (YouTube, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQqBJAB2XJU.

15. Maggie Nelson, “Art Song,” in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2022), 19–72.

16. Ibid.

17. I recall this discussion being in relation to Belcourt’s upcoming book, A Minor Chorus, which is bound to offer more insights into Belcourt’s thinking here. Billy-Ray Belcourt in conversation with author, Freezer Cheese: Queerer Times (April 14, 2022).

18. Lucas LaRochelle, “Honestly Confused, Creasy in the Memory: On Artificial Intelligence and Dissociative Worldmaking” (conference keynote, History in the Making 2022—Pandemic at the Disco, Concordia University, Montreal, April 2, 2022).

19. Lucas LaRochelle in conversation with the author, Freezer Cheese: Queerer Times (March 24, 2022).

20. Ibid.

21. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

22. LaRochelle, “Honestly Confused, Creasy in the Memory: On Artificial Intelligence and Dissociative Worldmaking.”.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. LaRochelle is working on creating a QT.bot platform where others will be able to interact with QT.bot’s queering features.

26. Dan Taulapapa McMullin and Yuki Kihara, eds., Samoan Queer Lives (Auckland, New Zealand: Little Island Press, 2018), 9.

27. Kama La Mackerel, ZOM-FAM (Montreal, QC: Metonymy Press, 2020).

28. Marsha “Pay No Mind” Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Vivek Shraya, Kai Cheng Thom, Laverne Cox, to name a few.

29. "Trans Affirmations,” Kama La Mackerel (website, March 27, 2019), para. 1, https://lamackerel.net/artistic-projets/trans-affirmations/.

30. Ibid.

31. Naheyawin, “Word of the Week: astam,” Instagram, December 8, 2018, https://www.instagram.com/p/BrIcKacgsQU/.

32. Jas M. Morgan, “Queer and Trans NDN’s Love to Talk about Sex with Their Kin, BB,” in Let’s Talk about Sex, BB (Kingston, ON: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2019), exhibition catalogue, 59–60.

33. Ibid., 65.

34. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Vancouver, BC: Milkweed Editions, 2015), 22.

35. Carina Magazzeni and Erin Sutherland, “Let’s Talk About Sex and All of Its Possibilities,” in Let’s Talk about Sex, BB, 29.

36. For detailed accounts of fa‘afafine and fa‘atane by fa‘afafine and fa’atane, see McMullin and Kihara, Samoan Queer Lives.

37. Léuli Eshrāghi, “Rimming Islands: Fa‘Afafine-Fa‘Atane Pleasure and Decoloniality,” in Sex Ecologies, ed. Stephanie Hessler (Trondheim, Norway: Kunsthall Trondheim, 2021), 101.

38. “Re(cul)naissance (2020),” Léuli Eshrāghi (website, 2022), para. 1, http://leulieshraghi.art/reculnaissance.

39. Ibid., para. 3.

40. “Compulsory heteropatriarchy” is a term Eshrāghi uses to describe the masculinist biases of colonialism. See Léuli Eshrāghi, “Rimming Islands: FaʻAfafine-Fa’Atane Pleasure and Decoloniality,” in Sex Ecologies, ed. Stephanie Hessler (Trondheim, Norway: Kunsthall Trondheim, 2021), 100.

41. Léuli Eshrāghi in conversation with the author, Freezer Cheese: Queerer Times (March 17, 2022).

42. Eshrāghi, “Rimming Islands,” 100–108.

43. CBC Books, “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on How Poetry Exists between Time and Space,” April 11, 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/books/leanne-betasamosake-simpson-on-how-poetry-exists-between-time-and-space-1.4627296.

44. Rovelli, Order of Time, 22.

45. See Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s description of Felipe Guaman Poma’s illustrations of precolonial Quechua stories and roles, specifically the depiction of the astrologer-poet, in Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonisation (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020), 11.

Time As Relative // Hanss Lujan Torres