The Gentle Knot
The Gentle Knot is an online collaborative story telling project hosted on Instagram, which seeks to gather stories regarding the multitudes of the queer experience.
​
Participants submit audio recordings sharing a story, thought, or idea to be shared in the page. This is played over a grainy image of flowers as a video. Submitters choose which identity signifiers to be shared alongside their story.
​
The Gentle Knot is organised in collaboration with Nadia Harari.
​
Mission Statement:
The Gentle Knot seeks to gather stories regarding the multitudes of queerness from a multitude of submissions. Too often is queerness reduced to orientation, and the multifaceted experience, presence, thought, tension, etcetera, leaving the queer experience unconsidered. Also, we too often are used to addressing others instead of ourselves, placing boundaries that divide us instead of fostering closeness among us.
Often, different forms of media accentuate this barrier by presenting, defining and resolving ideas and concepts. The Gentle Knot seeks to subvert this, embracing the ongoing and the inconclusive: just as the queer experience is.
The Gentle Knot pursues the infinite: of being, of community, of ourselves, of others, that continues within and outside of ourselves, within and outside of time, and within and outside of this database.
​
"..Lets adapt ontography as a name for a general inscriptible strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness od units and their inter-objectivity. From the perspective of metaphysics, ontography involves the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification or description of any kind. Like a medieval bestiary, ontography can take the form of a compendium, a record of things juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation.
The simplest approach to such recording is the list, a group of items loosely joined not by logic or power but by the gentle knot of the comma. Ontography is an aesthetic set theory, in which a particular configuration is celebrated merely on the basis of its existence."
​
Bogost, I 2012, 'Ontography' in Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pg. 38.
​