Alex: Hello, my friends and collaborators, Bea and Z. I am so grateful for you taking a little time out today on the weekend when so much else is going on in the world. We have a lot on our minds, burdening us, weighing us down. And still, we gather on Zoom to talk about a project that we’re very much in the middle of. Our inter-generational collaboration has been a long time happening. Our initial meeting and art-making was in 2021. And it has all been feeding for me, as we work on The Queering of the Corn, our still-in-process, co-created, DIY, zero-budget, lesbian, queer, porn, gothic feature film about industrial corn, and its ancillary projects like your just completed version of the film, B: Corn Killz (2025, 40 mins.)
What has our collaboration meant for you (a question I am now asking almost daily of people I am in productive community with)? What does our work together mean given that we met and began our collaboration at Art Farm during COVID lockdown? These are different times and more change is brewing.
Z: Collaboration is a constant stimulation. It’s a broadening of my process to include the process of others which makes me both pause and slow down and then also sometimes move much faster. So sort of putting on a disguise. Collaboration is an experience of checks and balances.
Alex: I love this idea of tempo, especially because ours is a collaboration of three people, over nearly four years, and we all have very different workflows and artistic rhythms. Of course Jenny Beck, another Art Farmer, will be scoring our composite feature film (adding together Z’s version, B’s version, the original VHS camcorder in-camera edit, and my writing), one in which tempo and duration are so much a part of the work’s gothic, erotic, and dreamy moods, but also how we made it (shot in a rush, edited over years, and even some pick-ups shot years later). But I think the inter-generational nature of our collaboration (each of us about 20 years apart: 60/40/20-ish), has its own temporalities and flows.
Bea: I think collaboration is a way to stay connected and see the broader reason for art and creativity and making things in general. I think especially living in Utah, it feels so narrow-minded and closed in. So being able to collaborate with people not of my age and people not in Utah keeps me remembering the greater picture of what it means to do art, which feels so weird and abstract of a career, especially here. I think it feels more relevant and meaningful when you get out of your own private studio and do it with people that you love and care about and feel connected to. It feels a little bit more tangible when making with others.
Alex: And how is this interval that we’re in weighing on your plans and thinking about how you want to be artists in collaboration?
Bea: Why do art when the world is literally burning? I’ve decided that it feels powerful to continue to feel a reason to create and just want to be happy. Making films—whether or not our film or my art in the future is actually commenting on the world or if it’s just completely outside of it—it feels powerful. Especially as queer women, to come together and still make art in the midst of all of this fucked up shit, and come together and take a pause to not think about it and just kind of make something that feels powerful to us.
Alex: Such a beautiful answer B, and so resonant with the kind of art that you make, why I fell in love with your practice in Nebraska, and why I was eager to collaborate with you when we were living together in Victoria. The film that you have finished as part of our larger project, Corn Killz, is so full of the pleasure of your inventive life-making, and the pleasures of your body … and the horrors. It is a horror film. I really delight in your practice.
Z: I am just sitting on B’s answer because it’s really good and touched on a lot of how I feel as well. It’s not that I don’t think things will change with the Trump administration. Obviously he’s trying to be disruptive. But at the same time, we need disruption, not the kind that he’s trying to bring, but the world is on fire, and I have this feeling that my present is not reality. The bombing in Gaza or the fires in LA are reality. And what is this? Disassociation? Just a trauma response? Or is this just a way of trying to grapple with the artistic impulse to be in touch with the collective unconscious married with the very recent and nuanced experience of participating in the world through social media while trying to ground yourself and have some embodied, meaningful agency in the present when the work we do feels so invisible and there is no infrastructure for organization and resistance and making art makes me feel better. But is it a coping or does it have a greater effect?
Trying to parse out the difference between making work that makes me feel better in a way that’s narrow and making work that makes room for change and room for resistance. And I don’t have any wisdom about it. I don’t have any answers. I don’t even know if I’m asking the right questions.
Alex: I like thinking with you, your questions. You asked “just a trauma response?” Is it just a trauma response? A lot of your work sits in this space. We invented the film during a very scary storm in a very unstable house, and your version of the shared script has become an encounter with your own trauma during COVID, as a survivor of the 9/11 catastrophe, and also a woman with sometimes disabling illness. Meanwhile, I think of this blogging practice as itself a kind of self-care, all the while distinguishing it from the kinds of self-care that are sold us on the internet.
This is where audiences come in. We had a whole plan for “a summer of corn” that has since come and gone: for screenings, and sharing my zines, and making rituals, and playing corn hole, and cooking, and planting, and inviting other artists to build on our script with more inter-generational DIY process and art. So many celebrations and uses of corn that may still come to pass!
Bea: I’ve been thinking about this for a while because it kind of ties back almost to why art in general? I’m going into an MFA soon, which feels kind of ridiculous in a world that’s crumbling, to be preparing to go to art school. I’ve been talking a lot about this with my partner, Rainn Forrest. We came to this conclusion: at the end of the day, the world is going how it’s going, and why not get together with people you love and make art? And then to extend that. We’ve been engaged with the idea of taking art away from just viewing and it being a means of connecting because I’ve been really dissatisfied with my practice lately of just being stagnant objects to decorate white walls. I really want my art to actually engage and become a tool of thinking and connecting with the people who I exist around.
But specifically, for my upcoming screening of my Corn film, I’m planning on leading my viewers through a ritual around it because I don’t want it to just be a film that we watch. I want it to be something that we do together and get a little vulnerable about. So, in this moment in my life, I am thinking about how I can use art more as a tool rather than just something to appreciate.
Alex: The final feature film isn’t done. We’ve been in process with it for many years. One day, our package, our collaborative project, is going to enter the world to an audience who just might need it.
Z: While queerness and gender identity are things that I implicitly focus on in all my work, they’re not explicit. And so a large part of what has been attractive to me about this collaboration is that we’re calling it our lesbian horror film. And so, this is a way for me to dialogue with both of you about the diverse relationships that we each have to queer identity and art that fits in those genres: queer, lesbian, porn, horror. That’s a recontextualization of my own practice that I’m finding really exciting in terms of audience. So, through the content of the film, but also through the content of our relationships, it feels like I am studying and taking some classes that I should have taken in college.
I’m not usually intentional about audience. So I feel sort of like it’s always a relief or a breath of fresh air to think about the reception of our work together, and the different ways that we could select choreographers or actors or whomever to partner with, because it always was collaborative and slip shod and it should continue to be!
I think figuring out how to take that as a thread and expand it through the release and reception of the film is an exciting challenge. Being really intentional about the last steps is hard because I try to rush through them, and I really notice with both B and Alex that there is a kind of purity of concept and as part of that, let’s just try this again, or let’s try this differently. Slowing down the tempo. It really helps me to not rush the landing because the landing is really important.
Alex: As is the process. Our queer feminist media praxis is really important.
My feminism is a process and queerness is one of its technologies
excerpt from Zine: Queering the Corn, by Alexandra Juhasz, to be released with feature film, The Queering of the Corn (Behl, Hurd, Juhasz, forthcoming)
My feminism is a process and related methods.
There are many feminisms: some personal, others movement specific.
My feminism is not about anything as much as it is about everything because feminism is my set of approaches to the world and its ideas and systems.
My feminism is a set of orientations and related ideas and actions—practices—focused upon changing or celebrating material and ideological conditions.
My feminism is not about women and females, or gender, or sexuality.
My feminism is not about race, class, ethnicity, disability, the climate, the environment, the internet, film, video, politics, my family, my friends, my community, or myself.
My feminism is a set of methods to engage ethically and collectively in thinking, teaching, collaborating, and making art and ideas about the issues and material conditions that concern me and others, including all of the ones listed above.
My feminism is good work. It is an ethical way to live.
My queerness is a process and related methods to think and act past intertwined binaries. It is an amplification or extension of my feminism—a technology. It helps us disrupt and refashion the world and how we live in it. Learning from and with others, I strive to make a world structured by other systems.