With Forests in Our Mouths
Speaking Queer Utopias into Being
(2025)

Format: Constellation artwork
Dates: Jan 2024 - Dec 2025
Venues: Multiple locations and online
Chapter Seven: 11-27 Apr 2025, Lou gallery, Helsinki (FI); 25 Apr 2025, Esiintymä Festival, Outokumpu (FI)
Chapter Eight: Book release, Jul 2025
Language: English, Damiá, Finnish
Project website: withforestsinourmouths.com
Article: A Constellation Artwork

Artistic direction, text, performance, design: Chris Gylee & Aslan

Working together as the Queer multidisciplinary performance collective ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, we will create and present the project With Forests in Our Mouths: Speaking Queer Utopias into Being. We will bring together live performance, filmworks, sound installation and publication to explore multiple visions of Queer utopias. We will use Queer biography, speculative fiction, and auto-ethnography as the raw material for this two-year project.

With Forests in Our Mouths is a ‘constellation artwork’ and each chapter offers an entry into the artistic enquiry of the overall work. It can be accessed in various times and places and in various different combinations. Audiences are given space to overlay their own interpretations and to make their own connections.

The stories we will tell are Queer myths brought back from a place that exists outside of time and place — a forested planet, ghosts from utopias of the past, journeys through time and space, sex and starships, strange grammar. We ask: What if Queer people had brand new words to speak with? What if we had a place that we could truly call home?

The project is an urgent attempt to imagine kinder, more accessible, and more sustainable futures where Queer bodies can thrive; it is an artistic attempt to answer the question: Where do we go from here?; and it represents a radical reimagining of our working practices, freed from the limitations and demands of the boom-bust cycle of short-term funding models.

For With Forests in Our Mouths we will be based in our rural home and studio in Outokumpu, North Karelia, with research trips, residencies, and public sharings taking place in locations locally, across Finland, and international

“Actually, we do have karaoke but you mustn’t breathe a word about it to anyone. Ever.”

If there is to be singing in Utopia, we have to make room for false notes, too! We can’t imagine getting to the new world and all of us being perfectly in tune. Utopia can’t be an excuse for musical fascism. It’s a place for wild singing under the moon. And the moon doesn’t care what you sound like. We lost all the old lyrics but we made up better ones — in the new language, using brand new words, singing about things we actually care about. We wear special costumes we made from old cloth, stitching magic into the threads since the Dark Days ended. Karaoke is our revolution and finally it’s Commons.

Echo Ballads // Pasián Esba is a live performance and exhibition by Queer collective ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, and represents the Seventh Chapter of the constellation artwork With Forests in Our Mouths (2024/25).

The above images include photography by ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS and Óscar González. 

With Forests in Our Mouths is a ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS production, supported in 2024 and 2025 by the Kone Foundation, and part of the Metsän puolella community of arts and research projects. Also kindly supported by Titanik, Silence Residency, TUO TUO Residency, Kaivos Festivaali, Theater neben dem Turm, Ballhaus Ost, Finnland Institut, Lou gallery, XS – Festival for New Dance and Performance. 

Additional thanks to: Arnita Jaunsubrena, Kristin Gerwien and the team at Theater neben dem Turm; Karita Tikka, Joonas Martikainen and the team at Hiljaisuus Festivalli; Katariina Vähäkallio and the team at Kaivos Festivaali; Juha Hirvonen and the team from Riveria; the Old Mine, Outokumpu; Mirjami Schuppert and the team at the Finnland Institut; Olivia Basterfield; Jennifer Bell; Abby Boak; Esther Boles; Niklas Ekholm; Amber Fasquelle; Ethan Folk; Kit Gee; Óscar González; Mmakgosi Kgabi; Inky Lee; Elena Polzer & Fedor Herrmann; Taylor Mac, Machine Dazzle, and Pomegranate Arts; Anu Pasanen; Tuuli Haapanen & Vaski Ylhäinen; Debi Kuisma & Ida Loukkaanhuhta; the poets of Helialá; Xdzunúm Trejo; Anna Matveinen; Juliana Irene Smith & Arvid van der Rijt; Remi Vesala; Esko Vihava.