“Beyond the Binaries” is a 32-minute video-lecture-story, illustrated with visual material created, sampled, and remixed from my own performance and visual art.  

I start from Paul B. Preciado’s declaration that the transversal thread connecting the roots of the climate crisis, racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and colonialism, is the binary thought that forms the basis of the structures of the sciences and heteronormative-patriarchal societies. 

I build my argument with episodes from my own studies in the environment, psychology, contemporary art, working in the Clinton-Gore Administration on the politics of climate change, multiple mental health crises, disability, and scientists I have met. I add lessons learned from my multiple mental and physical health crises, continuously morphing disabilities, and observations of women and gender nonconforming scientists I have met who dared to approach environmental science in new ways.  

 I cite Theo Coburn’s discoveries of how common household products disrupt hormones and reproduction, and I reflect on my ecology professor Joan Roughgarden, who transitioned gender years after I graduated, and subsequently revisited how much ecology had missed or gotten wrong about sex and gender in the natural world due to culture-bound blinders that originated with Darwin. I fold in Mark Fisher’s and Johanna Hedva’s pioneering work on how toxic cultural, political environments contribute to chronic illness. 

I include visual material from performances in Puerto Plata, Quito, Riga, Los Angeles, Almeria, New York, Santo Domingo, Jordan, Israel, Nicaragua, Mexico City, Bankgok, and more, as well as graphic illustrations, and paintings.  

„Beyond the Binaries“ had its premiere in December 2020 at the Placa Reial in Barcelona, as an official part of @drapart_org, International Festival of Sustainable Art of Catalonia, and was presented again at the 2021 Drap Art, this time at a daylong symposium at the Museum of the History of Barcelona, organized by the Art Department of the University of Barcelona. It has since been screened at festivals, galleries and events in cities including Riga, Philadelphia, Hudson Valley NY, Bogota, Puerto Plata, Cabarete, Kassel, Berlin, Malaga and Washington DC.