(Tending) (To) (Ta)
The story
An interdimensional correspondence between two beings sharing queer kinship and rooted in ‘ta’, the monosyllabic sound which in Mandarin Chinese encompasses all third person pronouns: 他 (third person male), 她 (third person female), and 它 (more-than-human lifeforms and objects). This experimental, narrative-led speculative fiction follows an exchange of internal letters between two protagonists who imagine one another across parallel dimensions. Each communicates to an envisioned other, who exists as a possibility beyond their self-perceived boundaries of reality, and these two beings meet in a shared world of imagination. In this reciprocal reach for the unknown, a world that bears an uncanny resemblance to our contemporary reality – colonised by Western capitalist constructs of race, gender and class, and characterised by a collective distance from Ta – opens a portal to another realm.