Queer Ecologies hosted the first Microbe Disco, as part of the online Electric Dreams Festival in 2020, featuring costumes, crafts, dancing, and a specially commissioned piece of sound and spoken word by Turner Prize nominee Sin Wai Kin.
This in/visible disco begins at the centre of a hot compost pile, where bacteria, and amoeba jiggle and twist with one another, digesting waste materials, making vibrations and busting moves. As things get moving, other creatures arrive, including worms, woodlice, rotifers, arthropods and humans (this is where you come in). It’s a multi-species & multi-generational virtual disco, offering a unique opportunity to meet your companion species, move with algae, moss, viruses, grass, skin, bark, poetry and other rhythmic delights under the microscope. When so many of us are isolated, rageful and grieving, spaces like this which hold joy, connection, interdependency and grief feel more vital than ever.
Queer Ecologies is an interdisciplinary intervention into how we live, grow, love, make kin and stand in allyship with the alter-human – a collaboration between me, artist and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge, and researcher, gardener and compostist Hari Byles. Queer Ecologies tells new stories about nature and our connection to it, empowering interspecies collaborations, and honouring the inherantly queer patterns and relations found throughout nature.

