Thinking-(queerly)-with the Crocus: An a-r-tographic Inquiry

This essay contends with the absence of a generation of queer elders as a result of the AIDS epidemic, and the resultant loss of guidance and lineages of knowledge for my generation of queer folks. In the course of walking with public art, I encountered a field of crocuses behind the Vancouver AIDS Memorial at Sunset Beach and began to consider this as a message from our queer elders, employing an a-r-tographic disposition that allows for an openness to new sensorial, perceptual, and conceptual connections. By engaging with the queer archives of the HIV In My Day Oral History Project and the alphabet art of the queer typographer and artist Nat Pyper, as well as my own 35mm photography, I investigate the queer pedagogical potential of the crocus in teaching us about community, relationality, and resilience, through the making of images that serve the educative purpose of teaching and being a visual record of the emotional and lived experience of the AIDS epidemic.