**** A note to the reader: In these webpages (and as in life) there are many absences. Erasures. Gaps in the narrative; holes in the plot. (Nooks and crannies in the craft, if you are more playfully and gastronomically inclined.) So if you find yourself reading something herein that feels incomplete, or half-baked, or in need of major elaboration or revision, know that I, too, am painfully aware of this feeling. Know, too, that I’m working on it. Yet traces and ghosts of the silenced abound. You have been warned. ****
My name is Lissette (Lee-SET). They/she/ki pronouns.
Perhaps as a sort of sorting reflex (I imagine someone who meets me for the first time thinking,”What kind of being have I just encountered and how should I respond in kind?”), oftentimes people will ask me what I identify as. (“Where are you from? No, really, where are you from?”) Here are some rather fluid responses (in order of magnitude/scale?):
I am also this song, which my father would play for me as a small child and which I now play religiously on repeat when I need to keenly hyperfocus on things: Tiny Geometries.
everything and nothing (simultaneously at once and yet deeply dependent on context, as situated knowledges would have it); a being made up of matter and beyond-matter (an inter-and-intra-being, a highly unstable category of constant becoming with others, liable to morph as soon as participatory bodies of stuff — the space between sub-atomic particles, nuclei and their valences, mitochondria, hair follicles, igneous bedrock — inter-and-intra-act with each other); a loosely held together human being (with mostly non-human DNA mixed with organic and synthetic molecules) of Native American, African, and European descent (in the last 500 years, anyhow — thanks transatlantic settler colonialism!); non-binary Latiné/x/a person/woman of color (depending on on who queer-friendly you are); first-generation United States of American (child of Latin American immigrants), first-generation college graduate (woot woot Oberlin), raised by working class/low-income-for-the-USofA-family); neuroqueer1 (bipolar, AuDHD 2, different-bodied);an art-science scholar and practitioner in Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS); multilingual, multicultural Unitarian Universalist and agential realist (thank you, Karen Barad, for their transdisciplinary work in quantum physics, feminist technoscience, and consciousness 3), who strives to imbibe everything until ki implodes into nothing, which therefore takes us back to the beginning of this list.
A dancer.
Also,
I am YOU.
And you are ME.
Funny thing, identity.
***
I was born and raised in Miami, Florida, a bioregion of Turtle Island that has been transformed from Everglades wetland to teetering metropolis, facing evermore socio-ecological turmoil. A child of Latin American immigrants fleeing war and poverty, I grew up somewhere in between Disney World Floridian fantasies and complicated post-colonial realities. My interest in the environment stemmed from family trips to the beach juxtaposed with images in my social studies classes of planet Earth sizzling in a frying pan. With the climate crisis disproportionately affecting vulnerable more-than-human communities around the world, my research on radical art-science collaborations points to the ways that colonization, industrialization, and scientific modernization have reshaped life on Earth in both global and local contexts while simultaneously reimagining more sustainable and just futures. Art-science works/interventions/enactments of all kinds – which span across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and fine arts – are needed in order to address our complex planetary challenges, including the climate crisis.
Contact: lissettelorenz@gmail.com
Lissette Lorenz 