united queendoms colonize California

united queendoms colonize California is a series of 22 episodes (mostly videos) produced during a two-months journey/performative expedition in California in 2007. The production of the series and each episode itself are integral parts of the performance. The story is a collage of inhomogen narrative fragments created through driving (urban) landscapes and encounting people as “agents on location” who’s own stories of mobility and migration carry forward the plot: “Are you on holidays?” – “No we are colonizing California”.

united queendoms don’t come empty-handed. Their bet is their story. The story of Queen Utopia and Queen Dystopia. Utopia, the image of the garden eden transferred to this world. A luscious landscape full of gold and fortune that has to be found. And Dystopia, the dark depths of animal desires and rampant vice. The temptation. The sirens’ chant. Both traditions of teaching plays, that demonstrate the imperfection of our own world/reality by designing either the perfect or the most tainted of all worlds and thus hold up a mirror to society.

Utopia and Dystopia dress up (in quotes) and start out in search of paradise. Just as the rumours of glory show, the promised land lies westward. California! The destination, that – according to the european myth of the golden west and its reproductions in arts and science – represents the incarnated paradise. The destination is no outland to the queens. For many years they have lived secretly and watched TV. They have consumed this multi-variant and fitted (european, male, white, heterosexual) tradition and schooled themselves by media.

The structure of the series is non-linear. united queendoms colonize California is a road movie/reality show/doku soap/foto love story. An intertextual experiment and a trashy transmedial myth-machine. The episodes are collages of loose drafts, images of Utopia and Dystopia and found footage produced along a pre-sketched route and timeline. united queendoms favour low tech, self-timer and the aestetics of clipping and gluing. The pleasure of cheap and glitty.

united queendoms cut the myth into pieces and rearrange . “QUEEN YOURSELF! COLONIZE!” is the call of a totally out of line enterprise of self-empowerment, a queer-feminist cross-over project. A quotes’ overload.