The Dandelion Club

Short Film

2019

Commissioned and workshopped through the Workman Arts "If You Ask Me" program in collaboration with Trinity Square video. Debuted at the 27th Rendezvous With Madness Festival. Made during the 2019 Roundtable Residency. 

Weed: A designation that has “no botanical significance” and merely denotes “a plant in the
wrong place”.
Unwanted.
Dandelions, a golden sign of spring, begin to
flourish around this time and swiftly carry me from an
existence of being seasonally affected to simply affected.
But in tandem to my relationship with these personally
pleasant omens is the collected horror of suburban lawn
owners, and obsessive patio gardeners across North
America.
It was there, in that strange duality, that I began
to identify with the social plight of the Dandelion. The
abject-ification and societal scapegoating of an otherwise
flourishing organism poetically reflected a queer
experience of displacement. An existence as a pest.
A nuisance.
And a fabulous one at that.
My previous thesis research delved into the
resilience of queer people in being able to flourish and
adapt to their surroundings with an implicit
understanding of life as social theatre, and the use of
performative and malleably constructed realities in order
to do so.
This resilience, a resistance to being suppressed and sheer will to thrive, parallels the transformative and self sufficient pollinating tactic of the dandelion. A collective resistance that collects at the margins of society and develops even on its fringes. No patch of concrete too solid to bloom through.
Negotiating identity as: weed or flower?