Who we are
Knowledge of Wounds is an independent, Indigenous-led gathering space that is co-curated by artist and writer SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) and writer and scholar Joseph M. Pierce (citizen of Cherokee Nation).
We work with a core team of Indigenous collaborators, including our producer, Carlee Smith and web designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson (Cree). We acknowledge the ongoing collaboration, consultation, and support of Merindah Donnelly and Blakdance, Emily Johnson and the Global Indigenous Performing Arts Network, as well as our partner organisations, Elders, and communities.
Knowledge of Wounds unfolds as a series of readings, meetings, discussions, and performances, and is not limited to any one type of knowledge or mode of expression. It is a ceremony, a gathering space, a fire, a calling to vibrate in good relations across Indigenous time and space, an evolving vessel for the exchange and cultivation of Indigiqueer knowledge, art, action and medicine. At the heart of our curatorial vision is the conviction that to gather as queer, trans, and two-spirit Indigenous kin, in good relations, means centering our own forms of knowledge production, our own vibrations and beings-with. Thus, we refuse the limitations imposed on our bodies by colonialism, normative taxonomies and epistemologies, and instead dwell in (and as) liminal thinkers and practitioners.
Our liminality is flesh and our flesh is liminal. Our knowledges are wounds and our wounds are knowledge. Ancestral time and Indigenous futurity—ancestral futurity—is our mode of engagement with the interstitial possibilities of gathering and envisioning together.
Because our futures are enactments of Indigenous praxis, queer, and two-spirit conjurings, our praxis is embodied but not limited to the body. Our bodies are sovereign and co-cocorporeal. In co-corporeality we gather and thus name our ethical commitments to each other, our fleshly joinings. Which is also to say: our gathering is an ethical, artistic, and communal commitment to Indigeneity, to becomings, and to desiring beyond, across, the limits of colonial normativity.
As such, our work is informed by our respective practices as Indigenous people in the broader fields of art, scholarship, and cultural production. Our collaboration draws on our individual experiences and research, and Knowledge of Wounds opens space for the trans-disciplinary imbrication of the histories, experiences, and desires that we each contribute as curators, and which is in constant dialogue with the artists and participants that gather with us, and communities to which we belong.