How can nature inspire new modes of resistance through rising tides of hypercapitalism? "Something Fierce" is a festival on queer ecology, expressed through performance, interactive, and interdisciplinary artwork. The work engages with biodiversity, speculative ecology, psychogeography, and climate change, through the lens of queer desire, community, and persistence. The event will take place at Flux IV in Hunter's Point, Queens, at the mouth of Newtown Creek- one of the most polluted waterways in the United States- on November 22 and 23rd, 2025. The festival is also part of Fall of Freedom, a nationwide wave of creative resistance.
Festival and exhibition hours: Saturday and Sunday, noon-9pm
Exhibition opening: Saturday, 5-9pm
Caroline McManus, Eli Brown, Eva Tellier, Hannes Egger, Hey There Kapplow, Martha Steele, Mason Youngblood, Michael Abrams, Midheaven Or Nah, Sally Beauti Twin, Walker Tufts, Zack Handler, zavé martohardjono.
Film and video program: Andrés Senra, Cherry Nin, Elsa Brès, Kris Grey in collaboration with Maya Ciarrocchi, Sandrine Deumier
Performances SATURDAY November 22
Noon-4:00pm Earthworks (outside- durational)
Trasonia Abbott (MC)
6:00pm Esther, The Bipedal Entity!
6:30pm Ria Rajan
7:00pm Noah Ortega
Performances SUNDAY November 23
3:30pm-4:30pm Lea Fulton (outside- durational)
4:00pm andrea haenggi & slice of elder tree with Muyassar Kurdi
5:30pm zavé martohardjono with Stacy Lynn Smith and Mike Clemow
7:00pm Dirty Time Karaoke
Live art
Sat/Sun 1pm-5pm Midheaven Or Nah
Sat noon-9pm / Sun noon-7pm Hey There Kapplow
Sat 5-9pm zavé martohardjono
Keep in Our Circle
2025, Live-performance: wood slice from an elder tree cut by the city during the destruction of East River Park; dance, voice, circle of witnesses; air, breath, and time. ~45 minutes.
A circle. A scream stifled in the air. A body unfolds in movement twinned with a slice of an almost-century-old tree that was chainsawed by the city during East River Park’s destruction—its living ground and elder trees obliterated in the false name of progress. Each ring is a living fluid clock, a marker of interwoven time, pulsing toward what continues beyond the cut. Bent and cracked like queer wings, it vibrates with grief, desire, and defiance. We trespassed to retrieve it, an act of care and dissent. Now the dancing body joins the tree’s ongoing action and voice travels through the circle. Breath and sound weave witnesses together. Keep in Our Circle is a queer ecological ritual of tenderness and ferocity, of staying alive together.
Cruising
2017, Video-performance, 16:33 mins.
This performance took place during the World Wide Pride event in Madrid in 2017 and was sponsored by the City Council for The Arts of Madrid. The purpose of the performance was to examine the landscape of a gay cruising area in Madrid and present it as a unique form of artwork, drawing inspiration from traditional land art works of the 1970s. However, it was specifically aimed at men seeking sexual encounters in that space. Even today, gay cruising areas remain the only meeting places for many men, not only in countries where homosexuality is persecuted but across the globe. These areas are characterized as heterotopic spaces located on the outskirts of cities, at the borders between urban and rural areas, neglected landscapes, and marginalized regions. They emerge as a result of the hierarchical distribution of public space, where exclusion has created an alternative space for socialization, similar to the back rooms of gay pubs and discos. Gay cruising areas are free and their users feel a sense of community, where men come together and share their bodies as a collective resource. The tour took the form of a psychogeographical walk.
toxic shock syndrome
2025, Tampons, epoxy resin, UV light.
Tampons are considered single-use, disposable materials, turning to trash, after being used by people with vaginas to absorb blood. Tampons often contain plastic and microplastics, in addition to harmful chemicals which permeate the bodies of millions of people. Yet they're necessary to absorb (and conceal) menstruation, perimenopause and other processes which cause bleeding from the vagina. When they turn to trash, they pollute, and when they're used as intended, they can both help and harm; every box of tampons contains a warning that leaving it in the body for too long may cause toxic shock syndrome, a potentially deadly bacterial infection. I've been using tampons as a sculptural material to explore the relationship between bodies, gender-based violence, disposability and notions of value and waste in our culture. This work is a kind of lamp, utilizing a UV light, which is used to disinfect surfaces in medical environments. It is inspired by Irish holy wells, which are private altars in nature, often hidden, tended to by community members and historical preservationists. These wells have pre-Christian roots and are believed to have healing properties related to the source of water, environment, rituals and dedicated local saints. This work interrogates which parts of our lives we privately and individually absorb, and how these experiences are intertwined with, and often determined by, greater ecological and social systems.
Life Force
2023, Video, 15 mins.
Moments before the bulldozing of an urban forest, a cast of isolated characters navigate crumbling city landscapes while attempting communication via glitching walkie talkies. Non-traditional, alchemical methods of filmmaking weave together this hyper-real, bio-political fiction. The result is an apocalyptic articulation of sexuality and nature as it exists in a post-industrial U.S. city landscape— i.e. the idea of "life force" as intrinsically queer, in decay, dead, and situated within multiple trajectories of power and matter. Though the repercussion of these trajectories is separation, a relentless reaching toward each other and toward life persists.
Karaoke
2025
Dirty Time is here to guide you on a journey. You have been taught that dirty is bad, but it’s not true. Dirty is good. It’s very, very good. Dirt is your companion, your time machine, your portal to the past and the future. And here’s a dirty little secret: there is no clean that’s not dirty. Not the cloud, not the Metaverse, and definitely not the screen. Dirt is a time capsule–it holds a record of everything that’s ever happened. And it’s a time machine–it breaks you down and shoots you into the future. But it’s here right now too. It feeds you and it eats you.
Untitled Water
2025, Water, Brush
地书, ‘ground calligraphy,’ is a relative new urban Chinese practice in which water is used to temporarily write, draw, and perform mark making. Calligraphy is a contemplative process, connecting the interior and exterior self in a private journey of discovery and expression. Inspired by ground calligraphy, we will creatively intervene at the mouth of Newtown Creek to write and witness a series of questions, poetic speculations, and symbols to reimagine its precolonial life and memory before European settlement and industrialization. Drawing from Mexican and Taiwanese mythology, we perform a queerly temporal, movement-based duet which explores speculative ecology through a cross-cultural cosmology which invokes rituals around divinity, spirituality, and ancestral technologies.
Another Mother: A Database of all Multi-Sex Species on Earth
2022, Website
Another Mother is an online database where users may view multi-sex/hermaphroditic plants, fungi, and animals, and map sightings of these organisms. Through observation and tracking, we gain insight into the ways the natural world has been utilizing sexual multiplicity as an evolutionary strategy for hundreds of millions of years.
Connivéncia
2023, Video, 11 mins.
Connivéncia is a short video. In the Cévennes forest, the journey we offer with my accomplices, a queer feminist group, opens up a breach, a space for speculation and interspecies language that shifts our perspective, intensifies the imagination, and invokes the idea of a possible "boarcentrism." Wild boar : an animal secretly crossed by hunters or breeders, it is said, in order to compensate for its scarcity in the 1980s. Their hybridity gives them a capacity to resist the idea of purity, a purely aesthetic fascination with living things. Their life in a multi-matriarchal structure and their fierce indifference to the boundaries of private property invite us to consider the forest mammal as a political animal, a potential ally in anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal struggles.
Esther Anthropocene
2022, Projector, screen, light, stage, 7:16 mins.
Esther Anthropocene
Esther investigates 3 candidates for the start of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration, the Industrial Revolution, and the European Colonization of the Americas, as explored in ‘Defining the Anthropocene’ by Simon L. Lewis & Mark A. Maslin. When did humans begin altering the composition of the land, sea, and air so drastically that it initiated a new geologic era?
Esther Etymology: Freedom
Esther explores the concept of freedom as interpreted by Classical and Modern Liberalism. As we imagine new social realities and ways of organizing, how do we define freedom for all? Freedom of opportunity? Freedom from poverty? Freedom to develop our capabilities to the fullest? Is freedom for some enough?
Swamp pleaser
2025, Ceramic
By fusing the high-arched silhouette of sex-work footwear with the exoskeletal architectures of insects, the hybrid, insectoid, platform stripper-esque form refract cultural assumptions about productivity, resilience, and collective survival. Insects, long coded as hyper-industrious yet radically communal, offer a material metaphor for the ways bodies and identities navigate labor structures that demand continuous adaptation and strategic self-presentation.
The piece echoes femme-presenting accessories as technologies that extend and transform the body. The heel functions as a prosthetic of femininity an engineered device that lengthens the leg and reshapes posture, modifying human morphology - its aesthetic power is inseparable from the labor and pain it requires. Part alien carapace, part club-floor prosthesis, the monstrous platform heel questions boundaries between organism and object, tool and living appendage, and alludes to techno-embodied practices.
Performance Now
2019, Bench, text on sweater, headphones, audio track, 3:04 mins.
"Performance Now" explores the boundaries between instruction, embodiment, and identity formation. The work operates as a score-based performance in which participants are invited to put on a red sweater, wear headphones, and follow a pre-recorded voice that guides them through a series of actions. Through this interplay of obedience and self-awareness, the performance stages the moment in which identity is both enacted and observed. Drawing on Judith Butler's theorization of performativity, Performance Now situates itself within a discourse that understands identity as a process rather than a fixed essence. Butler's extension of the performance concept to gender theory reframes gender identity—like identity more broadly—as neither ontologically nor biologically determined, but constituted through repeated performative acts. By translating this theoretical framework into a participatory format, the work invites each participant to experience the tension between following a script and embodying individuality, between repetition and self-formation.
Spilling Toxic Tea
2025, Newtown Creek water, various household ingredients, paper
Using an invisible ink based on water from Newtown Creek (one of the most polluted waterways in the United States), you are invited to share your dirty little eco-secrets anonymously. Does the self-care routine behind your iconic look involve you taking long, luxurious, water-wasting showers every day? Is your entire cabinet of sex toys non-recyclable? Does keeping your bevy of far-flung lovers satisfied mean your carbon footprint is the size of a Sasquatch's? Share your shame silently in superfund script on November 22nd and it will be revealed to all on November 23rd. Once the tea is fully spilled, it will be ritually enveloped in a queer, witchy spell intended not so much to absolve you of your eco-guilt, as to bless you with improved eco-karma in the future.
Procession
2017, Video
Inspired by the story of Jean Carroll (1910-1969), “The Bearded Lady of Coney Island,” who removed her naturally occurring facial hair with an early form of electrolysis then tattooed the majority of her body - effectively transitioning from “Bearded Lady” to “Tattooed Lady.” Procession queers the ceremony of wedding by deconstructing the costume, tradition, and union associated with marriage. The singular character collapses gendered signifiers through a mysterious walking ritual through public space and for the camera, yielding photographs and video work for exhibition display. This video piece was commissioned for and exhibited in Outcasts: Women in the Wilderness at Wave Hill in Bronx, NY.
The Thickened Thin
Ongoing process since 2020, Body and environment, 20 mins.
The Thickened Thin is a movement installation performed for the more-than-human audience. In its 3 year process, it has been performed for the Redwoods; the coastline of Evia, Greece; Holderness Cemetery, New Hampshire; Treptower Park, Berlin, the MacDonogh 800 year old oak, New Orleans, among others. The work asks,: Who are my kin? What do the dead want from us, as they expand their perspective? How does the elemental world teach us about deep listening? Can I dig a new archeology of belonging through ritual and movement? The piece is performed for an outdoor, wild or urban space and interacts with the unseen, but felt realities.. The audience is invited to witness how the space might change through the artist's interaction with the invisible.
Echo Archive: Gowanus
2025, Down-scan sonar imaging, hydrophone recordings, biosculpture
Echo Archive is a speculative digital archive. Drawing on Hugh Ryan's "When Brooklyn Was Queer", Echo Archive seeks to resurface erased queer histories embedded in industrial waterfronts, particularly the Gowanus Canal, imagining how queer ecologies might remediate the wounds they inherit. The archive is guided by the Eastern Oyster - a hermaphroditic and social species whose fluidity sustains entire ecosystems. The oyster becomes a living metaphor for transness and queerness as regenerative forces. In collaboration with the Billion Oyster Project and the Gowanus Dredgers, I am documenting industrial waterways using down-scan sonar imaging and hydrophone recordings, which will be translated into an immersive new media installation. Echo Archive turns to digital and diagnostic technologies as new ways of sensing invisible place.
Shrovetide
2025, Deer skull, ribbons, fabric, bamboo
A creature reanimated from the melting permafrost returns to modern-day cities to test for environmental toxins. It provides information for us to figure out a safe place to go in an era of increasing climate migration. It is inspired by ancient costumes that denote the changing of seasons. This is a female deer with antlers- called an "antlered doe," it is a rare phenomenon where the animal grows antlers due to a hormonal imbalance with elevated testosterone levels.
Alaka'i 1777
2025, Real-time simulation in Python and Max MSP, 8 channel speaker array
Alaka'i 1777 is an immersive sound installation that reconstructs the lost song culture of the Kaua'i 'ō'ō, an extinct Hawaiian bird, by weaving together archival recordings with interacting artificial agents. 1777 is the last year that the Alaka'i swamp, the Kaua'i 'ō'ō's ancestral habitat, was unaffected by European contact. Using a mathematical model of the avian vocal organ (the syrinx), trained on the few surviving recordings of the species, the work generates imagined songs—speculative echoes of what the Kaua'i 'ō'ō's vocal repertoire may have been before population decline erased its complexity. The entire soundscape is also slowed down, allowing listeners to experience the songs like the original inhabitants of Alaka'i. Within this expanded space, artificial agents act as spectral ancestors, engaging in a dynamic dialogue with real Kaua'i 'ō'ō recordings, offering a glimpse into a richer soundscape that vanished long before the last bird fell silent.
Recordings of Queer Joy at Riis Beach
2025, Acrylic and Shellac Resin LPs
My work reimagines discarded records as living canvases, transforming objects once meant to capture sound into visual vessels for memory, community, and joy. Records, with their grooves etched in time, hold the echoes of music, stories, and voices; by upcycling them, I honor their history while giving them new life. This series of six works centers on moments of joy in the queer community at Jacob Riis Beach— a space that has become a sanctuary, gathering ground, and celebration of resilience for me and for countless others.
Female Mars
2025, Fabric, astrology software, human presence, divine mind
Female Mars is an interactive astro-feminist performance oracle and hand-sewn tapestry drawing wisdom from matrifocal mystery traditions. Visitors received guided astro-magic embodiment sessions with OR NAH breaking down their natal Mars. A planet constellating passion, aggression, action, sexuality, ambition, drive and how we go about getting what we want - our Mars energy is yang, outward, instinctive, spontaneous and striving. How would warriors or daredevils make love? The more we study and claim our Mars energy, the more we direct it consciously toward positive ends, and the less we experience it from outside of us. Regulating our adrenals, protein, muscles, physical strength and sex energy, Mars is inflammatory! Mars is a powerhouse, rebel and stud. Participants exit the oracle with a customized toolkit of ways they can work with their Mars mojo to achieve goals, experience sexual satisfaction & release unprocessed anger which could be weakening relationships or diminishing health.
microPHONICS
2023-Ongoing, Misc. materials found in the enviroment & tech
In this work, we are invited to enter a strange not-not alien spacetime, a shifting, unsettled place of pre/post-human intimacies in search of a shared queer future. In its first iteration, microscopic video of a home grown slime mold colony was paired with a soundscape of analog electronic noise (produced from field recordings of various phenomena that the slime mold typical finds itself surrounded by when living in "the wild" (i.e. the sound of rain on dirt, crunching leaves, etc.). The proposed iteration keeps the general formula of pairing microscope video of biological material with live-mixed noise. Together we will select samples from within and surrounding Flux IV and, using a handheld microcopic camera, get up close & personal with the enviroment. The video from the microscope will be projected onto the wall and the camera will be passed around to whom ever is intetesed in using it. As this happens, I will be building a noisey soundscape using field recordings taken from the areas surounding the venue.
Hydro Commons (Live Transmission)
2025, Field Recordings, sound, video, live performance. 20 mins.
A site-responsive audiovisual performance situated along the banks of Newtown Creek. Blending field recordings, spoken word, ambient sound, and live generative visuals, the work unfolds as a durational experience - part transmission, part meditation. Through this performance, we listen with the site rather than to it, as bodies, environments, and technologies interlace through flows of sound, signal, and residue. Glitch, distortion, and repetition become aesthetic strategies to reveal perception as a porous act, dissolving the boundaries between human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic, memory and perception. Rooted in an ongoing inquiry into embodiment and environment, Hydrocommons imagines a shared ecology of attention grounded in intimacy & presence. The performance acts as a transmission between bodies, human and more-than-human, invoking connection, contamination, and transformation.
2WayLuna
2025, Bamboo, string, wire, lace, scrim, leds, timer
The work is a horizontally symmetric arrangement of two luna moth luminaries. Pink and blue (horizontally flipped atop the pink) scrim coverings are chosen as the colors of the trans pride flag. Cyclic lunar influence has typically been ascribed as affecting AFAB. I, a trans woman, have had lunar physical affect throughout my life. I will explore that further alongside this artwork.
Memories for an unstable future
2023, Digital animation, 4:40 mins.
"Memories for an unstable future" is a journey through landscapes, neither natural nor artificial in which the material of the landscape is the constitutive element of a new human existence. The video evokes the possibility of imagining non-invasive ways of living that could steer the present towards viable near-futures, where living would mean sharing the world-with.
MC
2025
Trasonia Abbott is a multi-disciplinary, non-binary artist from Richmond, Virginia. They graduated from Pratt Institute in 2020 with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Writing and a minor in Film. Trasonia is passionate about community building through arts and education. In the summer of 2020, they came together with some neighbors to found Queens Liberation Project (QLP), a mutual aid group mostly involved in resource redistribution events. In 2021 they curated and hosted a 3 night series of talks surrounding blackness and the future of art and activism after 2020, for Flux Factory’s Rhizome Project. The series ended with the Celebration of Black Life Cypher, bringing together black artists to showcase their works. In 2021, Trasonia participated in the Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute run by Project NIA and worked with fellow artist Ada Chen to put together the first Queens Solidarity Festival, which brought together Black and Indigenous lead organizations, artists and community with free food and a day of workshops and performances. Current projects include a mixtape centered on processing state violence, the planning of the second iteration of the Celebration of Black Life Cypher, as well as organizing a Coat Drive with QLP that will benefit the women staying at the Radisson Hotel Women Shelter in Jamaica, Queens.
FacePlant/Phylogenetic Tree Clock
2025, Too many
The DreamNet suspends a TV playing Faceplant above a mirror in the floor. This mirror becomes a hole, and viewers can only watch Faceplant by entering the hole. FacePlant is an experiment in inviting a shared human/soil holobiome. The Phylogenetic Tree investigates potential evolutionary relationships between bacteria that can make Stones & bacteria that can make Pickles.
Convolute / Lemuria
2025, Colored Pencil, paper / X-Ray Viewer & acetate
Convolute
Informed by José Esteban Muñoz's opus "Cruising Utopia," the Convolute diptych was made as a meditation on my own being in relation to nature consciousness. Specifically, it is a reflection on the tension between a unified and linear sense of self imposed by social apparatuses versus the reality that, like the rhythms of our planet, the self is nonlinear, untidy, and multiplicitous (and feral)! Symbolism and words fail, wonder and destruction can become one and the same, and an apotheosis into the mercurial has taken place.
Lemuria
An imagined ecosystem concerned with otherness as sacrosanct, and the imaginal as a place of refuge. In this place, the unknowable glimmers. The 'monster' is comprised of the numinous upon closer inspection.
asmr4apocalypse
2025, Soft sculpture, sound, box bench, bioplastic sculptures, edible herbal jellies, dance, 60 mins.
"asmr4apocalypse" is an installation with biomaterial sculpture and spatialized sound design. In it, audiences can relax, tap into embodied awareness, and consider the built environment around them. Narration and music guides visitors through the earth's 4.5 billion year geological history, and prompts visualization of a rewilded future when man-made institutions of war, like the Pentagon, will slowly, naturally disintegrate. Grounded in geological research, the soundtrack traces the organic origins of materials trapped inside colonial architectures. The audio meditations reconnect audiences to their bodies, trace the rather short existence of humans in the earth's long lifetime, and prompts them to consider the earth's extraordinary ability to regenerate and survive the greatest crises. At heart, this work asks: If this unsustainable world we built in a few centuries will eventually collapse, can we remember, now, we are totally equipped to dismantle harmful systems? Performance with Stacy Lynn Smith and Mike Clemow.
The exhibition is curated by artist Amelia Marzec. It is presented by Flux Factory, in partnership with Fall of Freedom.
About Fall of Freedom: Fall of Freedom is an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. Our Democracy is under attack. Threats to free expression are rising. Dissent is being criminalized. Institutions and media have been recast as mouthpieces of propaganda. This Fall, we are activating a nationwide wave of creative resistance. Beginning November 21–22, 2025, galleries, museums, libraries, comedy clubs, theaters, and concert halls across the country will host exhibitions, performances, and public events that channel the urgency of this moment. Fall of Freedom is an open invitation to artists, creators, and communities to take part- and to celebrate the experiences, cultures, and identities that shape the fabric of our nation.
About Flux IV: Flux IV is a new project space by arts nonprofit Flux Factory, where we host free and public exhibitions, gatherings, and artist projects. We are open on Saturdays from 12-6 pm and by appointment through December 2025.
Accessibility: Flux IV is located on the ground floor of 56-21 2nd Street, Long Island City, NY 11101 between the Queens Landing Boathouse & Environmental Center and Gotham Point apartments. The closest bus stop is 2 St/55 Ave on the Q101. The closest subway station is Vernon Blvd-Jackson Ave on the 7 line (purple) and 21st st G line (green). The closest ferry pier is Hunter's Point South Ferry Landing. A Citibike station is located at Center Blvd & Hunters Point South Ferry Landing. iPark (paid parking) is available on 1-20 56th Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101. There is a public restroom left of our front door.
About Flux Factory: New York City-based and collectively led, Flux Factory's mission is to support emerging artists through Artist-in-Residencies and Exhibitions, education and collaborative opportunities. For more information on our programs, visit www.fluxfactory.org or follow us on Instagram (@flux_factory).