Slippery Substances: Microdosing queer material
with Liz Rosenfeld
Course Structure: 1 x Welcome Session, iterative stucture over four weeks
Course Venue: Online & by correspondence
Course Dates: March 2021
Course Fee: Pay what you can
This correspondence course will entail a creative exchange through whatever medium one chooses: writing, documented performance, sound, drawing, video, photography, scores, etc. Between 10 participants, a different short work will inform the next, creating an exquisite corpse. I will create the first and last response. These works will highlight a microdosing experience in each participant's life, with the invitation for the next participant to do the same, thus creating a correspondence of both creative and informational exchange. The course will commence with a zoom hang- out, where all participants will meet for the first time and talk about the short works they have made. I intend to compile the outcomes and make an open source online zine about queer relationships to microdosing, and how the notion of micrdosing has been expanded past just substances. One can choose to include a short text about their work, as I will write one as well.
A digital course reader will be available for participants to explore various relevant texts for educational purposes only.
This course is for:
LGBTQIA+ individuals or allies who are intersted in microdosing as a concept and a practice.
Microdosing is the practice of consuming very low, sub- doses of a specific substance, generally a recreational or (un)prescribed pharmaceutical drug, with the intention of understanding how a very low dose can affect and slightly shift one's mood, perspective, and material. Typically explored in relationship to such experiences as depression, energy levels, libido, lucid visions, and dreams, microdosing could be approached as a renegade methodology, queering not just the potential of the body, but also the ways in which we inhabit radical time and space.
What do you microdose?
How does it support/ inform how you touch the world and how the world touches you back?
Have you always wanted to try microdosing and never had the opportunity?
What is microdosing beyond literal substance consumption? A feeling? A longing? A person? A fantasy? An element? A habit?
I have come to find myself to identify as a microdoser across many realms, bringing me greater insight into my relationship to urgent desire, as well as my longing to inhabit the experience of finding pleasure in patience. I have also come to understand my trans- positionality beyond gender through microdosing, and how trans identification is about the shifting material hosted by my body. A material that I consider to be in collaboration with.
Through creative methodologies I want to exchange microdosing experiences with you.
Documentation from a participant (2021)
Liz Rosenfeld is an interdisciplinary artist who works with performance,moving images, drawing and experimental writing practices. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz's work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, edging questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Embracing an auto- theoretical style, Liz's writing is rooted in questions that contend with how queer ontologies are grounded in variant hypocritical desire(s.)
Images:
1) Lead Image: Artist’s collage
2) Secondary Image: Documentation from 2021 course
3) Bio Image: Christa Holka