Cruising with Craft to the Ends of the Worlds: Practices of shattering, becoming scyborg and dancing with dragons as possible cartographies is an investigation of cruising with craft as a companion to explore how its languages and discourses contribute to processes of equity such as decolonization and can challenge ivory tower academic structures through its cracks and margins, the place of the undercommons. Thinking with craft becomes essential in scyborgism. As la paperson defines in A Third University is Possible a scyborg "is a queer turn of word that I offer to you to name the structural agency of persons who have picked colonial technologies and reassembled them to decolonizing purposes." la paperson uses the scyborg within the academic institution to use the resources given for decolonial purposes when reconfigured. There is interest in how this idea can be expanded to other institutions such as the archive and the museum as well as the academy and artistic practice-based research with craft as a companion. Craft becomes crucial for its direct connection to the colonial framing of human and non-human and forces the consideration of the individual as well as the collective simultaneously.
Collaborating and kinship making with artists and institutions of a vast array of disciplines has the potential to reassemble or reconfigure the current cultural systems of queerness and body politics while shattering the boundaries academically imposed on craft as a field. Unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of cultural institutions as unpacked by Kathryn Yousoff, there is an urgency to develop ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms. lambert deploys the shoal or sandbar in reference to the work of Tiffany Lethabo King’s work The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies to allow for constant shifting(s) and assemblage(s) to produce vibrations, meanings and embodied understandings. Through Natalie Loveless’s development of polydisciplinamory, a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating creates systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at, in regard to the othered body. These methods centralize joy and pleasure, making them crucial in developing alternative models of institutional existence.
The thesis is comprised of a miscellany of compositions such as texts, images, objects and prior publications that have been assembled together to form this publication with Patrick Lacey and Jens Schildt. In this, there is no ending, no beginning, no index, only choices to be made and actions to be considered. The process of this assemblage marks a moment where work becomes material, context and tool for cruising once again. The person who encounters this becomes the research, acting in solidarity with Loveless’ resistance to the monography that explains and instead centers the value and importance of practice as the research itself.
