What is it?
Flow.Walk.Drag is a walking tour through Liverpool L8 and Margate, led by drag artist as microorganisms (cholera & e. coli). It’s a deep dive into hidden water histories, turning sewage into spectacle and cholera into cabaret across Liverpool and Margate’s shores.
Why are you doing it?
Flow.Walk.Drag emerges from our ongoing exploration of the intersections between microorganisms, queer perspectives, performance art and community engagement. The project responds to a growing need for collective outdoor experiences that connect us with the non-human world. This project is our transdisciplinary artistic response to the climate emergency, offering a creative path toward solidarity & sustainable change where we live.
Why water, why microbes ?
Our project is built on an ecological revolution in thought that sees water as a source, not a resource, and bio-possibility: all life holds water within it; water collapses separations between the human and non-human. Through co-design and collective learning, we will explore other-than-human life that exists in water – microorganisms – and their intrinsic natures of being, care and kinship that include symbiosis and cooperation. Historically, cholera epidemics spurred the public health movement; today, issues like sewage spillages and waterborne infections highlight our continuing vulnerabilities in the face of climate change.
Why Liverpool & Margate?
Two climate-vulnerable sites are linked to introduce critical reflexivity and build solidarity between communities facing similar environmental challenges. The two are post-industrial sites with high levels of socioeconomic deprivation and inequality. Politically marginalised, yet with strong local, water-based identities and cultures, both underwent significant expansion and development in the industrial revolution and are grappling in different ways with local histories connected to the transatlantic slave trade. At the edges of mainland Britain, the sites are connected to each other by shared seas and waterways.
How will you do this?
Collaborating with community groups and activists, we will co-design maps of each place, plotting locations and histories that are ecologically important – historically and in contemporary crisis and resistance. Using drag as joyful protest, we centre the stories of underserved communities, weaving together social, climate, and ecological justice. It envisions a hopeful future, raises awareness, and inspires collective action.
Who is doing this?
We are a transdisaplinary team across Liverpool & Margate. We are always looking for more people to get involved.
When is it happening?
2025! We will spend the spring co-creating with locals (join us if you want to be a collaborator) and planning the tours in the summer.
Where did this idea come from?
This project builds on themes from the Endosymbiotic Love Calendar (2021), which emphasised that human survival hinges on respecting the non-human communities we rely on. The project made a lasting impact in the use of transdisciplinary storytelling in science communication, fostering ongoing conversations about forms of transmission and environmental justice and leading to a spotlight contribution in the published volume “Queering Science Communication” (2023)