2 days ago
Liz Rosenfeld, Crossings: creative ecologies of cruising
The recording of the launch of Crossings: creative ecologies of cruising, a collaborative work by queer scholar João Florêncio and artist Liz Rosenfeld from the 29th of June 2025. After a reading from the book, Liz Rosenfeld was joined in conversation with Chloe Chignell.
Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/crossings-creative-ecologies-of-cruising
About the publication
Crossings is not your conventional book. It hovers in the charged space between academic inquiry and literary experimentation, between critical manifesto and queer sex memoir—Crossings is an erotic hybrid form that dares to think through desire, with desire. Throughout its chapters the book moves swiftly between different streams of discourse from theoretical conversations to reflections on aesthetic and artistic practice to sensuous descriptions of bodily encounters. The writing darts in and out of these thought spaces with such dynamic that it thoroughly, and pleasurably, disoriented me as a reader and had me pause to ask: what is sex? And what is theory?
In this work, an artist and an academic intertwine their voices in a dialogic exploration of cruising—not only as a sexual practice but as a method of knowing, remembering, and of constructing queer sociality. The book unfolds both the poetic and political forms that cruising enacts. Together Joao and Liz, take queer sex practices seriously as sites of knowledge production, opening up the possibility for other kinds of thinking that occur through the body and in public, in order to enact tenuous and vital spaces of queer community.
About the authors
Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist and educator working across performance, moving image, experimental writing, and drawing. Their work explores questions of queer temporality, memory, and emotional and political ecologies, often through the lens of cruising and corporeal excess. Working with what they call "flesh as a non-binary collaborative material," Liz's practice, often auto-theoretical, questions how queer ontologies are grounded in variant and hypocritical desire(s.)
Joao Florencio is a queer scholar currently work at the university of Linkskoping. His research draws from queer studies, media studies, visual culture and cultural studies to investigate the ways in which the queer body has been produced, policed, and contested as a political site of creative and affective sexual world-making in modern and contemporary sex cultures. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig published by Routledge, in 2020.
Credits
Introduction and interview by Chloe Chignell
This podcast was edited by Ros Del Olmo
The intro music was composed by Ive Vargas