Toi Guy

Toi Guy is a queer geordie-colombian artist working with movement, sound, video and fibers to create performances, experimental media and wearable items. Toi aims to soften into new worlds beyond patriarchal-imperialist-capitalism through per creations, looking to create spaces of empathy and mutuality with collaborators through improvisation scores, deep listening practices, embodied explorations, possibilities to learn from companion species. Toi weaves in memory from per Colombian heritage through engaging with folklore and tradition. Experiments in fantasy, speculative futures, pleasure activism, quantum queerness and punk DIY ethics are valuable for Toi towards a root ambition of healing self and community, taking agency in future-building.

Current exhibition:
Organism Collective: Symbiosis

or jump directly to my contributions:

‘Identity is not an object, it's a process with addresses for the different directions in which it moves’ Lynn Margulis

Microbial Sex Video Comic is a series of videos to worm through based around different types of microbial sex. The project emerged through a process of embodied and visual responses produced as part of the collective’s transdisciplinary dialogue. Members of the collective ingested and transformed each other's references, materials and improvisations to cultivate a pool of interrelated elements that multiple entangled worlds birthed through. The world of Microbial Sex Video Comic is composed of porous components; footage captured in Kielder forest, Toi Guy’s body as a walking community, digital materials produced by Ella Yolande and sound composed by Ande Clock and Mia Windsor.

There’s feelings of yumminess, creepiness and sensuality to melting into a mossy forest that arose through filming and editing. The comic is proposing the possibility of these sensations as part of the microbial experience, beyond anthropocentric indulgence, since we are not human all the way through. These responses can be seen as sensory keys used to decode the way humans associate with organic matter.

Microbial Sex Video Comic

Cybershore Meditations is a portal for accessing 3 meditations for journaling, somatic practice and unconscious reasoning (as coined by Marcus Coates). The meditations facilitate breathwork and imaginative embodying to bring attention to internal landscapes that aren’t habitually stimulated through the ways we interact with technology. Personal data is constantly harvested and used to shape the futuristic cultures, cyber-landscapes and cyber-interactions that serve the capitalist agenda. Cybershore Meditations encourages the surfacing of deeply personal thought, fantasy and emotive texture to bring forward offerings towards collective embodied futuring, beyond surface attention spans and personalised advertising.

“I stand at the threshold of cyberspace and wonder, is it possible that I am unwelcome here, too? Will I be allowed to construct a virtual reality that empowers me? Can invisible men see their own reflections?” Essex Hemphill

The setting of Cybershore Meditations’ 3D world is loosely based on the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the world’s largest salt flat, which holds a large amount of the world’s known Lithium resource and attracts considerable extraction investment. As well as being a mineral resource for technology’s growing demands, it is also a mythical space that attracts tourists who want to experience its surreal mirrored landscape and holds cultural significance for local communities who associate the Salar with mountain deity Tunupa. These intersecting interests make Salar de Uyuni a culturally poignant place through which to explore technological futuring and its material implications.

The Aymara legend of Tunupa and the Inuit legend of Sedna are woven into the meditations, allowing the imaginal landscapes of listeners - with various cultural or familial associations - to meet with indigenous perspectives and stories of geologies and deep time. The meditations guide listeners through different time horizons, beyond current cultural implications to explore their geological, embodied and emotive relationships to Earth and its possible histories and futures.

Non-Human Sonic Entities w/ Jordan Edge aka Kiik Amor

This performance commision was performed at LaVallée, Brussels as part of Sit Back, Relax, and Enjoy the Apocolypse. The duet embodied Kiik Amor's sonic philosophies of co-species mutually and worlding through sound and listening.

Hello Rock, Tour De Moon w/ Jesse Salaman

Naturally Gay: Sheep Moss w/ Jesse Salaman

In 2023 myself and Jesse Salaman embarked on a 140 queer pilgrimage from our home in Newcastle Upon Tyne to Hebden Bridge, the Lesbian capital of the UK. We created a homage to the queer spirits and reflections we encountered on the way for Northern Pride 2023.

This site is currently under construction!

In the meantime, please scroll to the right for images and information about recent performances and projects. Enjoy!

This performance commisioned for Tour De Moon Newcastle 2022, explored questions of space travel and moon exploration through a post-colonial lens. How can we listen and appreciate lifeforce and potential that is present before us?

Contact:
toidinator@gmail.com

insta: @toidinator

crochet:
@toitoi_tejidos

Cybershore Meditations