A poetic truth about living a non-binary body in affinity with ambivalent gerunds of ice: After Kid Kokko’s Disappearing – A Passion
Anastasia (A) Alevtin, with sound by Joni Judén
Abstract:

A poetic truth about living a non-binary body in affinity with ambivalent gerunds of ice is an essay that practices a method of poetic truth to discuss the ambivalent affinity one non-binary body lives with (various bodies of) ice in the politico-material circumstances of the rapidly liquifying (and drying up) world. Composed of text, sounds, scanned images and their descriptions, this work highlights the impossibility and refusal of writing out a totalising truth about living one’s non-binariness; it equally signals one’s need to occasionally and tentatively suggest its contours. The essay emerges after Kid Kokko’s Disappearing – A Passion, a performance and eponymous publication that figures a gender through haptic affinity with snow, ice, fog, winds and other socio-material weatherings that, in concert with each other, lend a non-conforming bodymind their textures and textuals to refuse a Westernly binary assumption of gender, its institutional imaginary and intra-corporeal encounters that practically reiterate this binary.

Acknowledgements

Some thoughts and affects that come together in my contribution previously appeared in Slippery Theories of Worldly Bodies, an online performance lecture (2022), of liminal specificities (2023), a multimedia gesture, and (Very) Slippery Theories of Togetherness: an ice diary-dialogue (2023) — all with my co-thinker and hydrofeminist artist Hannah Rowan; some had fleeting presence in It is a queer body, too, a spell written and performed for More-than-critical-raw-materials, a witness seminar brought together by la fraud of Audrey Samson + Francisco Gallardo on the island of Seili (2022).

I would like to thank Kid Kokko for Disappearing – A Passion, Anouk Hoogendoorn for noticing (A), Cee Burgundy for ink hyphens, Ania Mokrzycka for photographic generosity and wisdom, and Rowan Lear for conversations about fragments and scripting crystallisation, Eelia Vihervuori for introducing me to that short story about an iceberg by Tove Jansson, Camille Auer for comraderies, being excited about hyphens, as well as, most recently, to Toni Brell for taking the materiality of sounds and genders seriously.

Finally, I would like to thank Joni Judén for continuous and generous artistic hyphenation.

The field notes used in the piece were collected and recorded by Alevtin during their residency at TUO TUO Arts in April 2022 and EST-NORD-EST artist residency in October – November 2023 as well as by Juden at TUO TUO Arts in November 2024.

Cover image
Foaming hyphens, EST-NORD-EST, 2023
Anastasia (A) Alevtin

Biography:

Anatasia (A) Alevtin (they/them) is an artist, theorist, and writer whose work follows world-making ambivalences and quiet – non-binary, queercrip, and migrant – quotidian subversions of the dominant Western normativites.

Joni Judén is an artist and musician living and working in Joutsa, Finland.