Micah Schippa-Wildfong is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, untrained choreographer, musician, unattended child with a hatchet, a dying dog. Their main concern is the total annihilation of power and the absolute emancipation of the human spirit. I try to fill my work with electricity. I try to hold the mechanical dove. No material is off limits.






Micah Schippa-Wildfong’s interdisciplinary practice traces the shaky architectures that emerge when objects outlive the systems that once anchored them, staging a collapse of genre where sculpture, theater, film, photography, and poetry go to undress themselves. Their work asks how the queer body—and the queer object—moves through a (supposedly) post-industrial world where material histories have slipped their moorings, where the residue of manufacturing, extraction, and abandoned infrastructures becomes a chorus of fugitive narrators, and a maze of mirrors darkly. In this terrain (this wasteland), objects are never still: they perform, revolt, deteriorate, and hallucinate, much as all things do in this interregnum predicted by Gramsci. Using uncanny assemblage, scripted gestures, lens-based reenactments, and poetic scores, Schippa-Wildfong coaxes their materials into states of ungrounding, letting them drift between usefulness and memory, ruin and reinvention. These hybrid forms refuse the tidy taxonomies of medium, instead orchestrating scenes in which matter becomes actor, stage, and unreliable witness all at once. Their works often hinge on the slippage between what an object was designed to do and what it now desires to become, revealing a tangle of industrial afterlives that persists beneath the visible surface. Schippa-Wildfong’s practice is shaped by queer strategies of survival and world-making, foregrounding porousness, improvisation, and chosen kinships with the nonhuman. There is a relationship here to the dematerialization and invisibilization of the object found in post-conceptual art practices and the way state violence is enacted against queer and non-normative people and relationships. By unsettling the stable narratives of progress embedded in post-industrial contexts and ideologies, they ask what kinds of intimacies and imaginaries can be coaxed from debris—how discarded things might carry alternate chronologies, embodied contradictions, or the faint hum of unrealized futures. Their installations and performances become temporary cinematics for these displaced materials, spaces where the lived lives of objects can be rerouted, retold, or tenderly undone. Their work ultimately stakes a belief in the transformative intelligence latent in matter and in the visionary capacities of queer aesthetics to reroute value, attention, and care. Moving fluidly across mediums, Schippa-Wildfong choreographs encounters that loosen the gravitational pull of dominant histories, allowing both bodies and objects to inhabit new states of precarity, possibility, and becoming. To quote the artist, “the work falls softly from the mouth like snow, covering the Venice’s of the world.”

— Helena Tziva

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