When asked in this moment to think about my past and a future through dance, these are some partial, contradictory and incomplete thoughts that rattle when I shake.

THE FUTURE? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT ENTROPY
IS GETTING HOLD OF OUR SYNAPSES?
DON’T YOU SEE THAT CRUMBLING
HALLUCINATIONS PROLIFERATE?
Franco Bifo Beradi, The End of Prophecy, 2018

Attack! Because it is always available, and because it is the real marker of the boundaries of our little propulsive heterotopias - worlds plural. World-making gives us the ability to move our prefer-not-to into a sideways gesture, a preferring differently, otherworldly.
Be Gay Do Crime, 2018

The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts us with the brutality of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. Poetry, sex, technology and pain and incandescent with this tension we have traced.
Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto, 2018


I AM WILLING TO LIVE A LIFE THAT IS DEEMED BY OTHERS AS OTHERS AS UNHAPPY AND I AM WILLING TO REJECT OR TO WIDEN THE SCRIPTS AVAILABLE FOR WHAT COUNTS AS A GOOD LIFE
Sara Ahmed, A Killjoy Manifesto, 2017

Don’t produce anything. Change your sex. Become your professor’s teacher. Be the disciple of your student. Be your leader’s lover. Be your dog’s pet. Anything that walks on two legs is an enemy. Take care of your nurse. Go into a prison and replay the main scene in Animal Farm. Become your secretary’s assistant. Go clean the cleaner’s house. Prepare a cocktail for the bartender. Close the clinic. Cry and laugh. Renounce the religion that was given to you. Dance on the graves in your secret cemetery. Change your name. Change your ancestors. Don’t try to please. Don’t buy anything you’ve seen advertised on a screen or any other visual prompt. Bury the statue of Apollo. Don’t try to please. Pack up your things without knowing where you’re moving.
Paul Preciado, 2016

We aim. We miss. We live in the gaps between our intentions and the shit that doesn’t work out.
Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, ‘Who Touched Me?’, 2016

HI HAVE YOU’RE THOUGHT ABOUT HOW YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT THE FUTURE BUT YOU’VE ONLY CITED WHITE MEN HEY HOW ARE YOU GONNA STOP THAT HEY WHAT KIND OF FUTURE IS THAT?
Linda Stupart, Virus, 2016

What defines the logic of a cultural moment? The efficacy of electoral results? Campaigns? Exhibitions? We urinate on insecurity, competition, alienation. Let’s mark our territory à la Romula and Rema. Subcutanean, subterranean reflections on power structures and alienation. We who are poor with sexy paint a-glowing; electric, distorted landscape for a face.
Vaginal Davis, 2014

First, the norms against which we struggle are social norms, and they govern us precisely as social creatures. Second, we make ourselves, if we do, with others, and only on the condition that there are forms of collectivity that are struggling against the norms in similar or convergent ways. In other words, we do not make ourselves as “heroic individuals” but only as social creatures, and though “my” struggle and “your struggle” are not the same, there is some bond that can and must be established for either of us to take the kinds of risks we do in the face of norms that threaten us either with unintelligibility or an overload of intelligibility. The point is not to institute new forms of intelligibility that become the basis of self-recognition. But neither is the point to celebrate unintelligibility as its own goal. The point, rather, is to move forward, awkwardly, with others, in a movement that demands both courage and critical practices, a form of relating to norms and to others that does not “settle” into a new regime. I take this to be a way of opening to new modes of sociality and freedom.
Judith Butler to Athena Athanasiou. ‘Dispossession’, 2013 

These are the axes:

1          Bodies are inherently valid

2          Remember death 

3          Be ugly

4          Know beauty

5          It is complicated

6          Empathy

7          Choice

8          Reconstruct, reify

9          Respect, negotiate

Mark Aguhar, 2012

What the witches challenge us to accept is the possibility of giving up criteria that claim to transcend assemblages, and that reinforce, again and again, the epic of critical reason. What they cultivate, as part of their craft (it is a part of any craft), is an art of immanent attention, an empirical art about what is good or toxic - an art which our addiction to the truth has too often despised as superstition. They are pragmatic, radically pragmatic, experimenting with effects and consequences of what, as they know, is never innocuous and involves care, protections, and experience.
Isabelle Stengers, Reclaiming Animism, 2012

Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 2011

…unbinding time and/ from history means recognizing how erotic relations and the bodily acts that sustain them gum up the works of the normative structures we call family and nation, gender, race, class, and sexual identity, by changing tempos, by remixing memory and desire, by recapturing excess.
Elisabeth Freeman, Time Binds, 2011

 
The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology.
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, 2009

We must vacate the here and now for a then and there. Individual transports are insufficient. We need to engage in a collective temporal distortion. We need to step out of the rigid conceptualisation that is a straight present.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 2009

Opening up to the fantastical wonders of futurity is the most powerful of political and critical strategies, whether it be through assemblage or to something as yet unknown, perhaps even forever unknowable.
Jasbir K Puar, Queer Times, Queer Assemblages, 2005

It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future is mere repeti­tion and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy Screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony's always explosive force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively - to insist that the future stop here.
Lee Edelman, No Future, 2004

…the scandal of the promising animal insofar as what he promises is precisely the untenable
Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, 2002

I have no idea why I am alive. In my heart I long to be back where I came from
AA Bronson, Negative Thoughts, 2001

What is going to come, perhaps, is not only this or that; It is at last the thought of the perhaps, the perhaps itself. The arrivant will arrive perhaps, for one must never be sure when it comes to arrivance; but the arrivant could also be the perhaps itself, the unheard-of, totally new experience of the perhaps.
Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 1997

What it comes down to is that I don't like the idea of originality.
Kathy Acker, 1991

…perhaps now is the time to practice a kind of generosity, a spirited inclusiveness which welcomes in sights and sounds which have been unseen and unheard of: to trade fear for an embrace, and to realise that to abuse power you first must have it. And those who have had it must know who they are. But those who have been largely excluded from power are also vulnerable to the inducements of its siren song, of its excesses and abuses. So the idea is not to replace one hero with another, one canon with another, one hierarchy with another: but to attempt a critique which is systematic rather than substitutional, which questions the methods of our madness and is interested a little less in the singer and little more in the song. Perhaps we must remain perpetually vigilant in guarding against becoming what we fear. Perhaps we must first work to recognise the full breadth and depth of our cultural qualities and only then begin the stringent framings of our taste, the anointed namings of our judgments, and the moist choices of our desires.
Barbara Kruger, Quality, 1991

A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short a devitalised existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong it, it is ready at any moment for a plunge into death […] I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverised, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow.
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, 1989

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 1984

“Oh, darling, for heaven’s sake, don’t take it so seriously! Just repeat after me: ‘My face seats five, my honeypot’s on fire.’”
Sutherland in Andrew Holleran’s ‘Dancer from the Dance’, 1978

WHENEVER ART HAS A SUDDEN SHIFT, SEARCH FOR A NEW SUBJECT MATTER. VIDEO IS TOTALLY UNFORTUNATE. EVERYTHING BEING DONE IN VIDEO IS OUT OF DATE […] WHAT MOST ARTISTS SHOULD BE LEARNING HOW TO DO IS LEARN HOW TO COOK, LIVE WELL, SO ONLY UNTIL ALL THE SENSES HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED CAN THE VISUAL SENSES BE DEVELOPED. DISCARD WHAT WE MAY HAVE STUDIED, RESPECTED OR LEARNED ABOUT ART.
Gregory Battcock, 1975

I believe in low lights and trick mirrors. A person is entitled to the lighting they need.
Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again, 1975

If the only real pleasure in my life that will be left to me is the one that comes from the transformation of pain into ART, then I want to tell about that because that is certainly better than nothing, which is what a lot of people are left with. Maybe my stiff upper lip will turn to ashes in my mouth and then I will be left with rising up out of that to make more art […] Who promised you a rose garden? I started out expecting the thorny side of the bush to be my lot … oh christ now I can’t stand my metaphors anymore. I’m just trying to say rage is ok, we mustn’t succumb to it by starting to look to it for energy. It is my uneasy companion. I keep my eye on it. I must tap other resources. Let’s make more art.
Letter from Carolee Schneemann to Yvonne Rainer, 1973 

Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1973

How can he who is not capable of life tell us what life is all about? A “male artist” is a contradiction in terms […] The true artist is every self-confident, healthy female, and in a female society the only Art, the only Culture, will be conceited, kooky, funky, females grooving on each other and on everything else in the universe.
Valerie Solanas, SCUM manifesto, 1967

But, obviously, I am speaking as an historical creation which has had bitterly to contest its history, to wrestle with it, and finally accept it, in order to bring myself out of it. My point of view certainly is formed by my history, and it is probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a questionable matter.
James Baldwin, The White Man’s Guilt, 1965

 More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever — make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you […] You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty […] You also must believe in your ability. I think you do. So try the most outrageous things you can – shock yourself. You have at your power the ability to do anything.
Letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse, 1965

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, 1964

Volunteer to have your spine removed
Dick Higgins, Danger Music Number Nine (for Nam June Paik), 1962

 Have a hard-on, and make others have one. This heat that comes from you and shines, it is your desire for yourself – or for your image – never satisfied.
Jean Genet, The Tightrope Walker, 1958