The Radical South: intersectional, queer playtime through music and performance-based Ad•verse Fest

Arts

Mar 5

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Ad•verse Fest, created and organized by queer artist and performer AC Carter (Klypi), presents an inclusive play time world that opens up new material sounds through a diverse blend of majority queer and non-binary musicians and performers. These aesthetics are sensual and vibrant with past histories, present forms, and future narratives that are fluid and newly textured. For the second year in a row, on March 6 and 7 of this year, queer artists and performers will gather in Athens, GA to deliver an exuberant, fluid, queer experience of sound and artistry. Doors open at 5:00 PM at the Athens institute for Contemporary Art, music starting at 6:00 PM. There will be an intermission before doors open at the Caledonia Lounge at 9:00 PM, shows starting at 9:30 PM. Each location’s set is designed by artist Eli Saragoussi, whose work asks how whimsical worlds can enhance the relationship between performers and their audience. These performances, these spaces and these artists are part of a queer resilience in the South that seeks reconciliation with and visibility within Southern culture.

Ad•verse Fest chooses a majority queer folks of a variety of political and personal backgrounds. This insistence on intersectionality presents a playing field where everyone can build a part of a fantasy world without being excluded or talked over. This fantasy world building takes imaginative exuberance and pushes it into real life so that the presence and aesthetic of queer persons are no longer othered or considered “alternative” lifestyles. The queer performers get the main stage--they are setting the story to be told.

AC CARTER AKA KLYPI (PHOTO: MAGGY SWAIN)

Organizer AC Carter, born in Alabama, fostered a studio practice at the Watkins College of Art, Design, and film, focusing mostly on painting and object making. They had always been singing since they were young, so including audio into their practice seemed natural. As their object making became sculptural during their on-going graduate career at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, so did their audio experimentation until they had formed a fully experiential studio practice that included interests in set design, fashion design, queer visuality, and experience curation through show making and collaboration. They’ve always been interested in breaking down harmful gender norms, but their understanding of the body extends far beyond the body itself. Understanding a show as an interaction with three dimensional space and architecture, AC deconstructs what a body is, what personality is, what art and design are assumed to be in order to make a rigid structure playful and inclusive.

Ad•verse Fest’s placement in the Southern, music-oriented city of Athens, reveals the strength of a multi-regional queerness. Differently-based artists can mingle in the same space to create a vibrancy that plays with definitions of queerness and gender fluidity. This all becomes about more than just the body (although, it most certainly is about that), it’s about redefining what it means to exist as a human with free agency.

One of the headliners for Ad•verse is Los Angeles-based Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron) whose stand up comedy and oration bear a satirical feminism that strikes political fundamentalism with makeup and outfits that smear and scream across their body and the stage upon which they stand. Add to that lineup is Oakland-based Wizard Apprentice (Tieraney Carter), who weaves introverted narratives through experimental tech sounds that acknowledge both their gender narrative and their racial narrative within the US. The combination of these two performers, along with other folks like Bustié and the Queendom, show just how eclectic AC’s studio practice is as it interfaces with music festival organization to promote queer folks in the US South.

DYNASTY HANDBAG (PHOTO: ALLISON MICHAEL ORENSTEIN)

AC realizes that Ad•verse Fest becomes political just by occurring in the South and by focusing on queer, trans, and non-binary folks before they consider anyone else. However, this resilience in the face of a culture largely built on rewarding straight, cisgendered persons, and subsequently punishing queer, trans, and non-binary folks, is more than just a simple protest or a recovery from hegemonic systems: it completely bypasses the cisgendered gaze and moved into the most playful realm of identity and community building.

That the South houses diverse studio practices that engage in intersectionality and interdisciplinarity demonstrates that queer cultures of the South and the contemporary artists that are emerging and converging in the South are relavant and needed within larger political discourses. There’s nothing backwards here--we are expanding and finding new ways to exist.

There is a privilege that comes with living in dense urban populations where queerness can sink into a plethora of different spaces and an amalgam of cultures. However, the South has always propagated its own culture and its own cultural stereotypes. There is a distinct Southerness that comes with living below the mason dixon line, and it hasn’t always been reconciled with queerness, even with the rising visibility of lesbian and gay southern persons. With events like Ad•verse Fest, QTNB persons and artists are becoming more visible and their entrance into music and performance industries brings a vibrant narrative that is pivotal to intersectionality moving forward.

The lineup for Mar. 6 includes John Kiran Fernandes, Josey (F.L.E.D.), Diatom Deli, Bacon Grease and Wizard Apprentice at ATHICA from 5–9 p.m., then moves over to Caledonia at 9 p.m. for sets by Breathers, Stacian, Bustié, Thank You Please and Mischa Mischa Lively + Mannequin Lover. On Mar. 7, ATHICA will host KAELIN, Secret Friends, Saadia Rias, Ivy Hollivana, Romantic Thriller and LEYA from 5–9 p.m., then Caledonia will feature Buddy Crime, The Queendom, Home Body, Dynasty Handbag and N/A Dance Party, from 9 p.m. until close. Check out adversefest.space for more details on the artists.

Klypi will be performing as an opener for Shitkid at 529 in Atlanta with Karaoke and Death Hags on March 9, 2020 (http://529atlanta.com/calendar/9204/) and will be touring in April 2020 with Precious Child (https://www.klypi.com/aboutme).