To Utopia and Back: Queer Ecofeminist Imaginaries in Contemporary Artistic Practices and Theory

This thesis explores utopia as a desired “not-yet” state of the world in contemporary artistic practices and theory, asking what utopian imaginary can be and how it responds to challenges of the Anthropocene. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer futurity, utopia is framed as a horizon that orients praxis and transforms in the thick present. I combine close visual and conceptual analysis with artists’ texts, reading theory alongside, not over, artworks. From a queer ecofeminist stance, I expand on posthuman relational ethics that destabilize binaries and present worlding as a situated practice. Organized in three “levels,” this thesis opens different scales of world-making. Level 1, Corporeal, explores porousness, intra-action, and technological entanglements of bodies, focusing on works by Mari Katayama, Petra Kuppers, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Patricia Piccinini, and Jenna Sutela. Level 2, Commonal, focuses on more-than-human collective agencies across local and global ecosystems with projects by Yuki Kihara, Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina, Precious Okoyomon, Julie Andréyev, and Asunción Molinos Gordo. Level 3, (Extra)Terrestrial, observes the Earth as a planetary body in works of A. K. Burns, Allora & Calzadilla, Susan Schuppli, Regina de Miguel, and Suzanne Treister. Selected works (primarily dated 2010s–2020s) are deliberately diverse in geography and medium to amplify strategies that orient us between the desired horizon and the present challenges.