Elæ Moss : Speculative Solidarities, Flatbush, NY (2026)

11/01/2021

110121 || LOG :: I passed by the church on ocean ave where the LED ticker wanted to know, “have you read The Word of God today”? And I thought about the way I seek to turn my eyes and mind and spirit towards sky and plant and animal, the tree just within view and the pigeons I’d just stopped to appreciate and document as they circled above Newkirk Plaza, and my cells answered, resoundingly, “Yes.”

11/01/2021

110121 || LOG :: I passed by a church on ocean ave where the LED ticker wanted to know, “have you read The Word of God today”? And I thought about the way I seek to turn my eyes and mind and spirit towards sky and plant and animal, the tree just within view and the pigeons I’d just stopped to appreciate and document as they circled above Newkirk Plaza, and my cells answered, resoundingly, “Yes.”

10/22/2021

[LINK IN BIO] Please continue to sign and share our petition in support of M. NourbeSe Philip and the legacy of the voices honored and exhumed in her singular work, 'ZONG! As told to the author by Setaey Adams Boateng'.
This is a particularly egregious example of how ego-driven projects within publishing institutions (and those upholding its worst qualities and practices) become toxic, turning on and enacting violence to the creators they narratively intend to (and perhaps, more troublingly, believe they actually) "support" and amplify.
When dealing with the treatment of a project like this, where race and the history of dehumanization via the imperial, colonial project is so central, the way in which the white European imperative of the Benway series claims and stands its ground with such indignation, and has the gall to turn on and vilify the Black woman author whose work they supposedly value is doubly shameful, bald and grotesque in its hypocrisy.
There is no way to undo this wrong. The harm it has already caused NourbeSe and the work it has required to not only face the original insult of the error but the second, more pointed wound of refusal framed this way is voluminous, something that pulping the book will never heal. However, it is the only way forward. And we, as an international community committed to better, need to stand firm against this and against what it represents in publishing and in the nonprofit and arts sectors, in the US and in other countries.
The seed that this can plant can begin to transmute this grave mistep into a new foundation. Only then does it start to move the needle away from profound loss into a new space, the space that work like ZONG! strives to make possible.

cc

10/20/2021

Happy international pronouns day! My pronouns are they/them/zie/zir. To explore your gender, to allow for the crumbling of the foundation of a gender binary even in the welcoming of non-binary and expansive gender identities in others is a courageous and scary thing for most people! The struggle to accept others pronouns is often, deep down, the fear of allowing verboten possibilities for the SELF. Let’s talk about it! Let’s do it together! And let’s make using pronouns in our bios, introductions, and anywhere else identifying information appears absolutely the standard, without question. We do this even before it’s fully easy or comfortable, not because it’s simple but because of love: for others, as carework, and because our species and how we know and speak ourselves has always been a work in progress. Onward humans! 💜✨🐛🌱

10/20/2021

It’s with great joy that I invite you to pick up a copy of the new* 2021 edition of the COLLABORATIVE PRECARITY BODYHACKING WORK-BOOK and RESOURCE GUIDE wherever books are sold! (Link in bio to pick it up at the OS Bookshop page!) This project was originally put together by Cory Tamler, Stormy Budwig and myself in conjunction with our workshop series back in early 2019, part of Stormy’s “Resistance Fantasies” residency at the Exponential Festival. My own projects often get put on the back burner while I finish up obligations for others (I’m working on this), so this new edition has been “in the works” for over a year! So excited to have it finally more widely accessible. In keeping with my dedication to open-source and archival process, building tools from operations, I proposed we create this book and was so glad Cory and Stormy were on board: it was used by participants in the workshop but created in a way that allowed independent use for autonomous study or to run the workshop, which we reverse engineered to break down within its pages -- alongside a substantial resource section w/ loads of prompts, scores, writing, collaborative play and experimentation. The original design of this work-book was very intentionally lo-fi and sort of fluxus, instruction-based-process inspired; it’s been printed in limited editions by our beloved and handsold or remained always available at indie shops like and here in BK, but it’s never been globally distributed until NOW! The new design is still an homage to the tradition of DIY artist book-objects and instruction guides in particular -- playing on the handmade aesthetic with texture and trompe l’oeil effect, challenging what digital “allows”. This work-book is part of a larger series of instruction sets, zines, resources and prompts that I’ve been designing for years now, ushering in more / OS work-books SOON… there’s so much in the works! Would love to run more of these workshops (which really were seeded, at least for me, in the earlier Interpersonal Infrastructures series that ran at )-- let me know if you’re interested in hosting!

10/19/2021

POWER ON : “Smooth cruelty can be sacred regularity,” with text written and read by Ginger Ko () over video by me (but really of Kusama’s work installed at the NYBG) — a collaboration made using the beta test of the Power On app, coming so soon along with its companion book from ! This is such an incredible project and I’ve loved working and thinking with Ginger on the UX for it! Follow along for more at the OS and at —

10/14/2021

1012-1321 | FIELD LOG || || there’s more to say then there is time to stop and say it but I’m seeking, still, to witness moments for myself and carve quick spaces for re/orientation wherever I can find it: acupressure points on the ear and wrist when I’m stuck in traffic, alternate nostril breathing on a zoom with my camera off, a quick sit, pause, sketch at the day’s beginning or middle or end or both. These give me so much joy. I feel I am reading and alive, offered a window into the lives of those who come to the pier everyday to fish — reminding me of the immensity of other stories even in a small dense pocket of just this one place in the galaxy, and also that I’ve already been so many different versions of this “person,” and yet it’s still just temporary, a story that could change at any moment and always is in ways unimaginable and unnoticed. Yesterday they caught a stingray and my heart also caught to see it flail on the pier, the empathic creature hypocrisy of the sympathetic omnivore, I guess. Once told me about an eye doctor who said you needed long views throughout the day between the short attentions and I think about that when I get to fix my eyes on details on a long horizon from the bay: lights on the coast, refineries, tugboats. The modern three blade mill of a wind turbine visible from New Jersey. How grateful I am to kill my darlings. How absolutely devastating senses are.

10/12/2021

101121 | LOG :: The work of listening and questioning / to honor by being quieter, by pushing up against performativity. // Today the “center for equity & inclusion” at the institution built on Munsee Lenape land that employs me posted its official “recognition” of Indigenous Peoples’ Day “as an institutional holiday,” and encourages staff and students to “reflect and honor the contributions of Native Peoples,” and ways to celebrate and honor -- oh yeah, but classes weren’t cancelled and offices were open. So, basically, a bit of public ceremony and a *personal* call for change, but not an institutional one: “honor,” provided it doesn’t impinge on capital or the moving forward of bureaucracy and the violent, colonial structures in which we still toil. Violence doesn’t always involve bloodshed: here are the ways it is more insidious, when it allows for and inhabits these public forms of narrative “knowing” and virtue signalling, with the teeth of what a true acknowledgement of not only Equity for the Indigenous Peoples of Lenapehoking but their ancestral, unceded right to this land. As an educator and an artist and a person who runs a project that performs institutional drag and in so doing becomes a part of the deeply flawed nonprofit industrial complex, I believe I have a responsibility to do more than just check the boxes of reposting and performing my allyship on a day like today -- in fact, I think the most important work any of us can do happens on the other days. But I wanted to take myself to task today, and ask myself (and others seeking to do more than just slip into the dangerous comfort of instagram-”activism”) some questions about what it means to do this work in a way that is profoundly needed and ongoing. Here, then, at this 11 hr workday’s close, an offering. Questions and observations, w/ some accounts to follow and amplify.
@riseindigenous

local: ,

10/09/2021

100921 | LOG || BOOK REVEAL! It’s here! At long last, I’m holding in my hands a physical copy of the ‘TransNarratives: Scholarly and Creative Works on Transgender Experience’ Anthology, edited with so much care and years of labor by Kristi Carter and James Brunton, and published by Women’s Press / Canadian Scholars. My para-academic entry, “Languaging a Future for Lovepersons: Speculative Strategies Towards Radical Trans/cendence,” feels so much at home with the other brilliant and necessary pieces included in the book’s final section, “Interventions and Activism,” which the editors offer “with the intention to keep looking forward,” alongside a series of questions for critical thought with which readers and communities can engage, so that book becomes seed, not repository. This brings together much of my research and thinking of (truly) over around two decades, but explicitly this piece was in the works and then edited substantially as this collection evolved -- since around 2017. In that time this project has grown and stretched and it’s clear it wants to be a book, and I deeply want to share this thinking and the strategies it offers with as many people as possible. Survival keeps so many of us of lesser means, with disabled bodies, so tied up in just getting from one day to another -- but what my work has long been about, and what this project is about -- is the possibilities that begin to get planted when we can both articulate, see, and shift these systems that have us in their clutches, working speculatively with worlds, words, and bodies. Someone wants to give me the book contract that would let me really sit with this work and gift it to everyone, to trans and q***r and disabled folx everywhere -- and to anyone who wants to trans/cend the limits capitalism tries to say they’re allowed to live within. I’d also be happy to send you the PDF if you’d like to teach this work! I may make some video content, reading excerpts, soon. ***r ***rFamily

10/02/2021

— I don’t know the original poster of this but I just love everything about it. Also, this post demonstrates so much of what I love about meme (and yeah, case in point: how it illustrates evolution and the shifting of meaning-making out of explicit institutional hierarchies). “Dictionaries aren’t rule book they’re record books,” can we all internalize this? Mostly true also with grammar “books”: language evolves and we catch up with it and record how it works / how we use it. Wait until you hear about the historical record and evolution of religion and power in relationship to what ended up in religious texts!

09/29/2021

Tomorrow!!! I’m so just elated to be hosting this q***r crip love fest of a reading to celebrate HYPERMOBILITIES, a new book from Ellen Samuels () pubbed via ! We’re also fêting PARING, Travis Chi Wing Lau’s () recent release. Joining us are Oliver Baez Bendorf ( ) and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ( ). In a time when so many of the hard won victories for disability access that last year began feeling tangible and real are slipping away, with the academy failing disabled students and staff, it feels especially important to gather in this virtual space with other q***r disabled maker-scholar-change-agents and celebrate possibility and writing our stories into the archive. Thanks to the initiative, McBurney Center and anonymous fund for their support with and for this event. Please join us! Link in OS bio. ***r

09/26/2021

092521 | FIELD LOG || ***r // Really leaning into textile and color play today. Thinking about performance, and the drag that is the marriage of artistic, cultural, historical reference and gender experimentation is an everyday act and very central to my creative practice. I am pushing back more and more on the ways we are supposed to feel validated or gauge artists’ legitimacy or “work” based on their visibility or relationship to institutions. Everyday questions and and intentional engagement with form, identity, and materials is just as legitimate — what if “being an artist” is just a question of how you operate in and against the world?

Elæ Moss : Speculative Solidarities

11/01/2021

11/01/2021

10/22/2021

10/20/2021

10/20/2021

10/19/2021

10/14/2021

10/12/2021

10/09/2021

10/02/2021

09/29/2021

09/26/2021

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