Enqueery is a collaborative studio and shop exploring craft as investigation, as therapy, and as an essential part of a positive feedback loop of care and culture.

Why queer?

In reference to Walter Benjamin, writer and thinker Gabriel Levine speaks about profaning certain elements of traditional practices as an act that breaks down ritual and established separations. In Levine’s beautiful book, entitled Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings, he examines notions of queering traditions and vernaculars in order to heal ourselves and the world. In profaning certain seemingly binary separations like the oppressed and the oppressor or the blessed and the cursed we are able to begin to see and experience our world differently. In my own reading of Levine I see and experience my world more naturally and less formally. I think of queering and profaning various separations in my life practice- masculine/ feminine, straight/gay, mothering/fathering, friend/lover, and the domestic / art making separation (just to name a few) in order to better navigate the highly formal and rigid systems and institutions that are in place in our society. Elimination of these separations begins to reflect more of an Indigenous worldview and less of the dominant modern / colonial worldview. Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvez in their best selling book Restoring the Kinship Worldview write that “Colonizers use explicate-order concepts that do not fit dynamic reality.” They go on to say that, “The idea of a static world full of separated objects has caused endless problems as experts isolate fragments of reality and take actions that do not account for their impact on the whole.” The kinship that Topa and Narvez speaks about is one that involves the entirety of nature. The queer view of the world is then one that encompasses all as one, including things that seem lifeless and other to the colonial eye. The queer understanding is one that is holistic and sees all as sentient and conscious, and non-hierarchical.