Animal Behaviour
Jaffna Queer Festival will be returning for its third edition in September of 2023.
Taking a gestural cue from critical folklorist Prof T. Dharmaraj’s stunning recasting of Sangam poet Kaniyan Poongundran's cosmopolitan lyrical adage 'yaathum oore yaavarum kelir' (Every place is home, and everyone is kin), the Jaffna Queer Festival's theme for this year ‘Animal Behaviour’ aims to animate conversations around the self and otherness through the question of the animal.
Animal spirits occupy a canonical place in queer articulations. In Shyam Selvadurai's novel Funny Boy, the protagonist narrator Arjie finds the notion of pigs being unable to fly as a queer impossibility. The figure of the flightless swine evokes a life of improbable desires and aspirations ("the sky is too high, and the pigs can’t fly") - at odds with the predetermined path of the 'natural self’. Animals often appear in fables to impart moral lessons and teach us the laws and order of the 'natural' world. The combined moral universe of Aesop, Jataka, and Panchatantra fables is a universe of strange animal-human interrelations.
Yet, to what extent do these moral lessons hold room for queer conundrums? Can the pig transcend its limitations and soar with sheer willpower? With the aid of assistive technology and discursive permissibility? What about the strange spiritual powers of delusion? Should the sky, deemed too high, be brought down by a notch or two? Can virtuality provide an answer? Should the swine aspire to fly in the first place? And from where does this longing and aspiration stem? Should the flightless creature make peace with its material conditions and limitations? What is a pig to do!?
Building upon the themes explored in the previous Edition 02: Queer Ecology, this year's programming will delve further into questions surrounding queerness, ecology and the cohabitative ethics of our relationship with animal others.
Venue Partner: Kälam (50 Kandy Road, Jaffna)
The Jaffna Queer Festival is made posible with support from: Goethe-Instiut Sri Lanka, Alliance Française and Fold Media
Back
