chimeras
10.17 - 11.24.24
Dale Zine
50 NE 40th St, Miami FL
2086
It once seemed impossible. A Category 5 in early June. In my grandmother’s telling, the storm’s landfall felt like a meteor impact—the earth plunged into darkness as the sea engulfed the land. In the years since, kudzu has glazed green what’s left of the shimmering glass towers at the edge of the city. As their foundations sink deeper into the muck, the skyline looks like the jagged ribcage of some hulking beast. Waves break over the creature's spine, the desolate chain of suburban islands following the curve of the ancient, elevated reef. When the storm hit, the state delayed evacuation orders until it was too late, a decision many of us believe was an intentional choice to abandon the last progressive haven on the peninsula. What was left of the region was designated by the government as a wildlife management area, but without any effort at “management” to speak of, the plants have grown thick and wild, and no one knows much about what happens on the inside.
Now, four decades after the storm and nearly two since I was born, life on the mainland has become untenable. Increasing authoritarianism and an expanding draft for the state defense force pushed me to leave before I was forced into militia service. I loaded a few small bags onto my father’s skiff and left in the night, heading south through a labyrinth of canals and reservoirs. All telecommunications have been cut off to the city, and the Coast Guard has retreated from the waters around the islands, which are increasingly blocked by gyres of floating debris offshore. When the government realized the islands were harboring dissidents, they launched a shadow war, restricting access to the territory, removing holdouts, and monitoring the area through a network of modified trail cameras.
By the time I reached the shores of the city, the sun was rising and only the last of the stars was still visible. As I clambered inland through mangrove tunnels, the water grew still and clean as it was filtered by their roots. In the dappled sunlight, I could see the bottom now—bars of sand drifting over old cracked asphalt, a green-tea lagoon steeping in the tannins of the forest. Slogging through the estuary, I startled swarms of minnows and a flock of ibises, whose dawn chorus echoed all around me as I pulled myself over the tangled roots.
I came here in search of chimeras. They were the people who thrived in these ruins after the storm by grafting a strange new branch onto the phylogenetic tree. Back home, I’d heard folktales about them: a queer group of mutants, made animal by nuclear fallout or symbiotic contamination. But this was all salamander slander. The chimeras protected themselves the only way they knew how: by mimicking the creatures around them. They're the only beings here who can swim out of the surveillance net that blankets the islands, through an evasive performance that can only be taught peer to peer, species to species.
Together, we learned to scurry from root to crevice, under twigs and leaf litter. Our fur became dappled with bits of it all, speckled patterns of the underbrush that rendered us nearly invisible to the surveillance software. In this murky landscape, cloaked in camouflage, it’s a miracle we were able to find each other. Yet we had to, so we did. We evolved new ways to see through each other's disguises. We marked safe routes with our musk trails and sang to each other in frequencies at the edges of the spectrum. And our cloaked bodies—drab and mottled to camouflage us from prying eyes—grew special structures that fluoresce in ultraviolet patterns our eyes adjusted to see in the dark.
To a hunter, we were just another leaf in the forest.
To each other, we beamed like fireflies.
About the Exhibition
In Lee Pivnik’s exhibition with Dale Zine, he dives deep into Florida futurism, crafting a world six decades from now. In chimeras, Pivnik speculates on how it would feel to live in a version of Miami where the frightening trends we’re seeing today spiral out of control. Taking seriously the threats posed by rising seas, stronger storms, and the aggressive persecution and scapegoating of communities across the state of Florida, Pivnik insists that strange and beautiful creatures will endure through the most serious environmental and political disasters.
The exhibition is focused on “the chimeras”, an imagined population of queer dissidents that have resettled the abandoned region around present day Miami, after a hurricane has devastated the sinking city. Relying on elaborately adorned disguises, the chimeras have evolved their own complex performances to mimic the species around them. In doing so, they are able to evade the surveillance systems that have been deployed by the state, while still catching the gaze of one another. Pivnik’s exhibition is both a celebration of the adaptability and craft traditions of queer communities, and a reminder of this landscape's long history as a place of refuge for various communities fleeing oppression.
