13 January - 4 February, 2022. Verge Gallery, NSW Au.

Part proclamation, part love-letter to our past, our present and our future, ’80 years from now’ is an urgent, but gentle message that our here and now are not enough. It sends a signal for the recalibration of our individual and collective queer-political-environmental imagination to change the horizons we are working towards. What world do I want to leave 80 years from now?

In this exhibition I am reflecting on the prediction that in 80 years time my cultural homelands, the islands of Mauritius and Seychelles, will be fully submerged underwater along with many other island nations in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Reflecting on this predicted loss and its melancholy, in a time of rapid climate change, increased radicalised conservative politics and social change has prompted me to question what horizons I am working toward individually, and collectively. The COVID-19 Global pandemic has forced a recalibration of the ways we perceive our self and our collective communities. Like many, I have been forced to re-evaluate my desires, my hopes, and my horizons. Undertaking a process of transformation, I am learning to lean into my transness as a non-binary person, I am learning that I am A-sexual, and I am learning to confront the dysphoria and melancholy that I live with. I am learning that the person I am becoming is more important than the person I once was and where do fit within a rapidly changing world. In this exhibition, I ask what have you learned about yourself and what world do you want to leave 80 years from now?

Ultimately, this exhibition is about affirmation self-awareness, survival and preservation of histories that have had little time to no time for conversation. It is also about the broader conversations the work generates between histories of photography, queerness, colonisation, climate change, unrequited love, loneliness and where they may speak to one another. This imagining is a future where my queerness, my body and ancestral histories find a sense of harmony in a time and place that feels like it’s on the edge of falling.
Read ‘Solar Punk Futures’ by Amy Claire Mills and Listen to Verge Gallery’s In Conversation podcast with Kieran Butler and Amy Claire Mills.