Queering Intimacy Through Acts of Care: A Conversation With Kerri Flannigan and Megan K. Quigley

“Caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

This conversation is a reflection on the possibilities of queerness as discussed through the collaborations, conversations and gestures of labour enacted throughout the ongoing project Feeling Measurements, facilitated by artists Kerri Flannigan and Megan K. Quigley, among many collaborators and co-conspirators located on Lekwungen, W_SÁNE?, T’Souke and Sc’ianew territories in Victoria, BC. The project has included pierogi-making, relational mapping, knot-tying, creating cordage from invasive species and making jam as gestures that ground and materialize the project’s theoretical negotiations of queerness. Each of these activities was selected organically during the process, based on the varying interests of the participating artists and collaborators. Feeling Measurements attempts to consider queerness not only as an orientation, but also as a framework for the ways in which we experience and enact care to each other, and to the places around us. The Feeling Measurements methodology hinges on the possibility that queerness can exist as a framework for intimacy, enacted through lateral collaboration and partnership, as well as through privileging embodied knowledge. Below, the artists discuss these methodologies through the metaphor of the “fathom,” a concept that reveals our sometimes complicated and contradictory