Queeries: On Gatherings & Retreats
and Midjourney and AI, oh my! 😵💫 😵💫 😵💫
It’s been a busy June, and not exactly for the typical parties-during-Pride reasons.
I’ve been to two gatherings / retreats this month, and that’s where my mind is at. This year, moreso than any other since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, has felt like the year to host in-person gatherings, and I’ve learned some lessons about event-planning.
Never get too attached to the original plan because it might not pan out.
Make sure folks are informed about the local weather and the conditions inside the building where the retreat will take place (are masks required? are water bottles allowed?!)
And always, always, always give yourself +/- 30 minutes of buffer time. Everyone experiences time differently—especially us lovely people of the global majority :)—so set your start times accordingly.
At the top of June was the Dark Matter U (DMU) retreat. DMU is a democratic network of BIPOC built environment design educators who work to collectively create new, and ultimately anti-racist and liberatory, forms of knowledge & knowledge production, institutions, collectivity & practice, community & culture, and design. Magical things happen when you’ve been organizing for three years on Zoom (only small subsets of people had met up at sporadic events) and you suddenly meet everyone in three dimensions, all at once! We reflected on our work—and woooo have we done some work—as well as our challenges and where we fell short in our goals. We split up into regional breakouts to brainstorm ways to take more strategic action to truly disrupt the hegemony of the traditional Western canon and academic structures. It really felt like we were having, as adrienne maree brown says, the conversations that wanted and needed to be had.
What really stuck with me, besides the work that we did together at the retreat, is alllll the socializing. The side conversations while walking back to the hotel together. The debates that materialize over plates of food from a museum cafeteria. The intimate details you learn about other people when you share space with them. In short, the retreat set up situations ripe for the interactions you can’t get over Zoom.
Which is interesting, to me, because I associate “retreats” with going away—shutting oneself from the world, getting alone time—not with meeting up with ~30 of my friends whose professional lives and values align with mine.
A retreat from life would look something like the image below—an amalgamation of images from the internet fed through Artificial Intelligence to create a rendering of a place that does not exist. Soft evening sunlight filtering through tree canopies, whose perfect reflections paint the calm surface of water. Lush green plants; bridge to an unknown but enticing destination; supple mist in the background. A vaguely pagoda-ish home sits in the background—obviously not the subject of the retreat, but signaling shelter and amenities and cozy rest in the middle of a relaxing landscape.
In the middle of June, I went—no, not to a place like the image above, but to New Orleans, Louisiana, for the 2023 Design Justice Summit (DJS), co-convened by Design as Protest Collective (DAP) and Colloqate. Design Justice forwards the radical vision of racial, social and cultural reparation through the process and outcomes of design. It seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that create and perpetuate systems of Injustice in the built environment. Together with ~100 people in multiple workshop sessions over four days, I learned about innovative strategies to center communities within planning and design, how to preserve Indignenous cultures, the importance of food justice and water sovereignty, and built a mobile memorial dedicated to victims of racist violence and hostile architecture.
Most of all, I commiserated with some of my favorite people. Yes, I got powdered sugar on my legs and feet while eating my first NOLA beignets. Yes, I sniffed a glass of Sazerac, the official cocktail of the city, and immediately felt hungover. No, I did not get much sleep before my flight home, but I did spend quality time with my fellow DAP organizers.
Maybe gathering together is a form of retreat—especially if you can’t gather more frequently.
Above, a queer gathering that I most definitely did not attend this Pride Month, though it looks chill. Who brings bottles of hoisin sauce to a picnic, though?!
Below, a stylized illustration of a spa retreat… in a place that’s so upscale, the pool isn’t just in the sunroom, but also outside. Actually, it looks flooded. Climate change really is here—even AI knows it.
I was deeply involved in planning the DMU retreat (not so much for the DJS). We didn’t explicitly plan for queer spaces, but they emerged just by virtue of there being a critical mass of BIPOC queer people together, sharing space. Before I even knew I was queer, and even when I was a baby queer, it felt so magical and unreal when the majority of my social group was queer people of color. Now I have truly felt the power of it. Now I want to feel that all the time: the sparkling goodness of creating queer spaces grounded in knowledge-sharing, promiscuous care, and love for each other (and not just in sexy ways!).
Please enjoy the collage below about queer space and astrology that would have taken me hours to perfect, but took Midjourney only ~2 minutes, including creating additional variations and upscaling the image. There’s a lot going on. Midjourney must have the most vivid dreams.
One day, we (the royal we, as in me and all of you readers of this newsletter) ought to gather together at a retreat and share space together. We could talk architecture and design and surveys et cetera, but we could also just socialize and get to know one another. The same way AI-generated images are a gathering together of (uncredited) artwork and a retreat into virtual, imagined, and speculative worlds, a queer space retreat could be a gathering of like minds coming together to dream up queer futures.
😵💫 I hope these words inspire in some way, shape, or form.
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Until next time,
A.L.
😵💫😵💫😵💫