Queering Lives and Ecologies of Care

Queering Lives and Ecologies of Care delves into how artists express and reimagine lived realities by challenging conventional binaries of gender, sexuality and the human/non-human divide.

The panelists will share stories about finding voice, listening differently, material and aesthetic choices, and collective approaches. The audience will be invited to reflect on how queering might be translated into our own practices as a powerful catalyst for the building of inclusive environments that heal and care.

Convenors and moderators: Dr Woo Yen Yen and Dr Cissie Fu 

Speakers: Amin Alifin (performing arts); Dr Rosslyn Prosser (writing); Zarina Muhammad (fine arts)

Amin Alifin is a multidisciplinary performing artist with 17 years of professional experience in the performing arts industry. A versatile dancer and choreographer, his work spans theatre, music and visual arts, shaping his distinct approach to teaching, competing and choreographing both locally and internationally. Amin is also the co-founder of Vogue In Progress, a trailblazing collective that pioneered the Ballroom scene in Singapore. Amin’s presentation will focus on 'Ballroom for LGBTQ+ and Allies'.

Rosslyn Prosser is Programme Leader of the MA Creative Writing programme at LASALLE. Dr Prosser's presentation applies in the areas of life-writing, poetry, fiction and traditional academic modes. Recent work published with Routledge in 2024, (with co-author Rob Cover), is Queer Memory and Storytelling: Gender and Sexually Diverse Identities and Trans Media Narratives.

Dr Prosser's presentation applies Anne Cvetkovich’s notion of ‘archives of feeling’ to queer domestic spaces and will discuss the ways that the informal archive is one that can be read for material and emotional histories.

Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Her long-term interdisciplinary project investigates Southeast Asia’s evolving relationship with spectrality, ritual magic, polysensoriality and the immaterial, examining these themes against the backdrop of global modernity, the social production of rationality and transcultural exchanges of knowledge. She is the winner of the 2022 IMPART Art Prize.

For her presentation, Zarina will draw from reflections on the processes and pathways that have emerged from her long-term research project Breathing in a World of Water // Calling the Earth to Witness. This sharing engages with questions on what it might mean to commit to feminist, anti-racist, queer and decolonial ways of approaching research, teaching, (un)learning and making art.