Queer Animality Roundtable: ‘I Bought Goats on Craigslist’

Queer communities have often been at the forefront of discussions around environmental issues and animal rights, striving to inhabit the world in ways that challenge anthropocentrism. Animals are a source of inspiration to many contemporary queer artists, who aim to disturb culturally constructed binaries and social hierarchies in their work. Ksenia M. Soboleva spoke with three such artists, who currently have exhibitions and screenings in North America and Europe.

Ksenia M. Soboleva In anticipation of our roundtable exploring ‘queer animality’ in your artistic practices, I was listening to a conversation with Janine Benyus, a queer science writer who since the 1990s has advocated that we look at the natural world not as a resource, but as a mentor: as something to learn from rather than just about. What are some of the ways your work engages with animal life as a queer model?

Erin Johnson In 2013, I moved from California to Georgia and decided to buy a herd of goats I found on Craigslist. The goats were entirely resistant to the frameworks I tried to impose – fencing, boundaries, predictability – and so, eventually, I abandoned those. I spent my days lying on the grass with them, filming their movements, feeling their touch, entering and exiting the frame. These moments remind me of how, in Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant describes Riva Lehrer’s painting of Riva (a human) and Zora (a dog) as a scene where two beings are ‘experimental[ly] sutured’. Animals represent a fluidity of relationships and intimacies that allows lives to intertwine in unexpected ways, released from established social norms.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan Growing up, I experienced difficult things with people, which deepened my bond with the animal world. Animals have always offered me a sense of grounding and trust: a relationship free of judgment or expectation, one that’s rooted simply in being. This connection is foundational to my work. In ‘Snailing (Slippy slimy slug slut)’, my show up at Canal Projects in New York, I’m drawn to species whose behaviours challenge ideas about which lives and bodies matter. By creating immersive environments that destabilize human-animal distinctions, I invite audiences to rethink intimacy, interdependence and value beyond heteronormative, anthropocentric models. For me, queer animality is a way to imagine new, expansive worlds.

Ohan Breiding My work often engages with interspecies intimacies, turning to animals as a model for queer community. In my project, Souvenir (2023), made in collaboration with Shoghig Halajian, we explore the longest known migration of marine species that travelled over ten years via plastic debris from Japan to US coasts. This form of migration is referred to as ‘rafting’, and the species that hitchhike are known as ‘fouling communities’. Once these marine species arrive at the shore, they are deemed non-native, invasive and a threat to local ecosystems. The native/non-native dualism is complex given the systematic efforts to control the migratory behaviours of certain species over others. As a result, those species manifest a form of unwanted excess or an abject buildup – perhaps even a queer resilience.

KMS How does your engagement with animals and non-human life inform the material and formal aspects of your work?

EJ Animals and non-human collaborators compel me to work with rhythms and patterns that I might not arrive at otherwise. In a project centred on the Savannah River Site (SRS), a radioactive Superfund site in South Carolina, a pack of feral ‘Carolina Dogs’ informed the structure. While looking into SRS’s history, I connected with Dr. I. Lehr Brisbin, an ecologist studying the radioactive animals there, who introduced me to these dogs: a kind of spectral presence at SRS, always at the edges, running from tree to tree. Their movements led me to structure the film, Heavy Water (2018), as a three-channel installation, where the dogs appear, disappear, and re-emerge across the screens. It’s as though the film itself runs, slips away, returns.

ADHJ I often look for materials that evoke fluidity and adaptability – qualities I observe in animal life. For instance, I might work with organic substances, reflective surfaces or flexible materials that change under different conditions, inviting viewers to experience the piece as something alive and responsive. I’m drawn to structures that mimic natural cycles or nonlinear forms, creating environments that feel layered and interconnected rather than fixed or hierarchical. By experimenting with materials that decay, shift or react to their surroundings, I aim to replicate the dynamic qualities of ecosystems, where every element contributes to an ever-evolving whole.

OB To create my experimental film Belly of a Glacier (2024), I returned to my childhood home in rural Switzerland via the Rhône Glacier. Neighbouring villagers have been draping thermal blankets over the glacier, expected to fully disappear by 2050, to insulate it from rising temperatures. I documented the glacier through photographs, video and sound recordings while considering concepts of corporeal vulnerability and glacier calving – which is paralleled in the film by the birth of a cow. I focused on animals that rely on the glacier’s waters – the same way filmmakers rely on hooved animals’ bodies, via their gelatin, to create film for a future archive.

KMS Do you believe a turn to animality is necessarily accompanied by a negation of the human?

ADHJ That’s a fascinating thought that deeply resonates with me. Rather than negating the human, I believe it challenges the rigid separations between human and non-human life. By turning toward animality, we’re not discarding humanity but expanding it, embracing the qualities we share with other beings and acknowledging our place within a larger ecological web. In fact, I see this turn as a kind of reclamation – a way of moving away from anthropocentrism without erasing the human, questioning and destabilizing the hierarchies that position ‘humanity’ as inherently superior.

OB I agree. Duk Hee’s comment reminds me of a section in Anne McClintock’s 2010 essay ‘Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice’ that I often revisit. She writes that ‘thinking through fugue futures invites a radical perspective of collective time … new responsibilities open’. In my work I try to connect corresponding language across the bodies of animals and those of glaciers – such as ‘tongue’ and ‘calving’ – to ultimately invite a closer listening to the landscapes and animals that sustain us.

EJ A year into my life with goats, I learned about the Goat Man, a kind of itinerant queer figure, traveling via a wagon pulled by goats. He claimed that living with goats changed you, that through ‘the law of contagion’, you become more like them – more slippery and unbound. Back to Berlant’s Cruel Optimism: one of the central questions is why so many people remain bound to conventional ways of living, even when they generate so much evidence of their failure to sustain life. Shouldn’t we, she asks, strive to attach ourselves to forms of life that allow for greater flourishing? That’s something I continue to look toward as a queer model: the way the Goat Man learned from goats to refuse norms. ‘People are goats’, he said. ‘They just don’t know it.’

Ohan Breiding, ‘Promiscuous Ghost’ is on view at OCHI Gallery, Los Angeles from 16 November to 21 December 2024. Breiding is included in ‘Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean’, on view at Oceanside Museum of Art through 19 January 2025, and Belly of a Glacier (2023) premieres at MIX NYC on 21 November 2024.

Erin Johnson’s Heavy Water (2018) was screened at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn on 10 November 2024. Johnson is included in ‘Erin Johnson & Ilana Harris-Babou’, on view at Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, New York through 1 December 2025, and ‘The Air of the Now and Gone’, on view at Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, from 26 January to 26 April 2025.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan, ‘Snailing (Slippy Slimy Slug Slut)’ is on view at Canal Projects, New York until 7 December 2024; Anne Duk Hee Jordan, ‘The End Is Where We Start From’ is on view at Kunst Haus Wien, Vienna until 26 January 2025.

^{Main image: Ohan Breiding, Still Life with Sappho and Octopus (Queer Still Life Series) (detail), 2015, Giclée print, 51 × 76 cm. Courtesy: Ohan Breiding and OCHI Gallery}