Skin Thirst is a developing series of curatorial projects, feeling out the tactile metaphor of touch, and touch as it relates to Queer protocols.
The series considers anti-disciplinary approaches to skin, to senses, feeling and groping, constrained and unrestrained pleasures and pustules.
Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Supplanting traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are languages that regulate how people relate to each other, to their cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. They are evidence of governmental, organizational, social, or corporate power structures.
Protocols speak to processes, rather than finite outcomes. While often overlooked or invisible, they set the tone and conditions for potential encounters. With the engagement of artists, scholars, activists, and students, this project will consider Queer protocols as the foundations for the performance of living, and begin thinking and working toward new spaces of political empowerment.
Inspired by Karen Barad's On Touching—the Inhuman That Therefore I Am, this research and curated series is thirsty for it.