Ama Josephine Budge
Ama is a writer, curator and activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental revolutions and queered identities. Her work challenges neo-liberal feminisms, working to activate and catalyse movements that emphasise human rights, ecological revolutions and de-gendered identities. Ama is an Associate Lecturer in Culture, Criticism & Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UK) and an MFA tutor at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Ama recently submitted her PhD titled Intimate Ecologies: Queer Speculations on Pleasure, Blackness and Decolonial Aesthetics, under the supervision of Dr. Gail Lewis and Dr. Margarita Palacious. Her practice as a speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist navigates that which the author terms ‘Intimate Ecologies’ in order to explore Blackness, aesthetics and queer, pleasurable, interspecies futures.
“That which I have termed Intimate Ecologies is a form of relation to the non-human - i.e. all that lives around us - acknowledging the stewardship, co-dependency and intimately intertwined modes of “becoming with” that have been championed by indigenous communities across the Global South for centuries. These communities now find themselves on the front line of catastrophic environmental change they did not create, facing social and ecological genocide at the hands of climate colonialism. In contrast, returning to an ontology of Intimate Ecologies makes for sustainable and infinitely diverse possible Black futures in which humans are in constant transformation, co-creating an abundant ecology not because we have to to survive, but because we desire to, to truly live.”