Fellowship

Grant Watson’s research for BAK is conducted through the interview project How We Behave, an archive of radical practice—understood as life practice, aesthetic practice, and political practice—which has been developed since 2012. How We Behave pursues the idea of self-care, predominantly focusing on queer and feminist positions, and the interaction between personal stories and collective political projects, in the context of neoliberal hegemony and ecological crisis. At BAK, this research has been developed through interviews with the 2020 BAK Fellows and as a response to BAK’s long term research itinerary Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017-ongoing). Interviewees articulate resistance to multiform oppressions (including) in relation to race, gender, sexuality, military occupation, and cultures of competition and alienated labour; and they describe how political practices get to be formulated. Using an unstructured format, the interviews allow narratives to emerge, which are then edited in collaboration with interviewees, producing stories constructed from the interview transcripts that are then read by performers. A concurrent line of reading and research explores intersections between queer and left politics, through historical examples, such as the Marxist orientation of groups like the Gay Left Collective in the 1970s, as well as contemporary writing, which integrates questions of sexuality and gender, insights from ecology, and counterculture with a broader structural analysis from the Left.