Namesake

Namesake is a poly-disciplinary short film which imagines queered timelessness, multigenerational, manifold dimensions of various cultural traditions, teachings, memories. This work explores themes of family, homeland, and liberative legacies through the practice of (re)naming.

Namesake illustrates naming and re-naming as actively tied and intrinsically a part of our differential and overlapping cultural contexts, familial blood lines, and chosen-family networks. Namesake understands names and re-naming as a deep part of traditional, cultural, spiritual, familial legacy and the patterns, cycles, celebration and violence that exists there. This project aims to unpack complex and harmful realities of legacy while also engaging in joyful futurisms of queered legacy. Namesake acts as an archive of present, past, future through holding elements of current self-identification, heritage, and dreams for fuller destiny.

Collectively, we also see this as a way to honour our various customs, familial legacies known/unknown, visually and sonically archive memory, grieve our various displacements, and celebrate in our findings of new family - of each other. We also interpret this work as active cultural ritual that allows us to imagine living possibilities where our queerness is holy, our ancestors are resurrected, our healing is eminent, our traditional practices are accessible, our teachers are restored, borders dissolve, and our chosen/biological families travel freely. This work aims to discuss the expansive possibilities of reclamation of familiar tradition, understanding queer love as spiritual ancestral wisdom, and reconfiguring our temporal realities to concepts often understood as “time”, “closeness”, “spatial intimacy”, “gone”, “language”, “sacred”, and “distance”.

Namesake understands remembrance and recollection of tradition as inextricably linked to reinvention, this repetitive pendulum swinging between lineages of homeland, lineages of home, lineages of blood, and lineages of queer inheritance translate to the possibility, ambiguity, unknown threshold of liminal space/queered and trans cognizance. Through this work we collaboratively redefine the bounds, expectations, and futures of gender, family roles, sacredness and time – celebrating subversion, disrupting conformity, and re-plotting our acclimatized perceptions of true/false, beautiful/ugly, tradition/change.