Speculative Etymologie(x) Firm: Maroon(z)

Maroon/z isn’t still. It leaks, sweats, and shifts shape. It carries fugitive knowledge—Black, queer, trans—and lets it spill across sacred and profane terrains. It asks: what if the places we run to, the places we hide, the places we fuck, the places we pray—are all the same place? What if survival itself is already erotic, already spiritual, already dangerous?

This project doesn’t sit politely inside the archive. It stretches the archive until it moans. It goes digital, treating the internet like a maroon clearing—an unruly site where queer descendants of slaves gather, reach for one another, burn, invent, disappear, and come back. Desire here isn’t decoration. It’s currency. It’s refusal. It’s a map you can’t trace twice.

The first ruptures come through Artist Research Studies. One pulls together the Fugitive Futures Collective—Devon Gray, Dom Dureseau, Rodell Warner, Roy Kinsey, K Anderson—five artists opening portals with their own rituals of queerness, fugitivity, and maroon aesthetics. Their works don’t close the wound; they keep it breathing inside a URL.Archive.Portal, a digital body that refuses to stay clean. Another unfolds in Marseille—a port city already haunted by the Atlantic’s hold—where eighteen queer and trans asylum seekers gather over three years. Together they create an archive of pleasure, a fugitive ledger of rituals, site-specific offerings, and queer currencies that cut across slave routes and the uncounted losses of queer life drowned at sea.

Maroon/z holds fragments—archival, ethnographic, performative—but refuses to stitch them into something neat. It wants the pieces jagged, leaking into one another. It imagines the maroon not as past tense but as continuous: a practice of queerness, of fugitivity, of world-building that is never finished.

It leaves us with questions:
What does it mean to build a spirituality out of wounds that never healed?
What if pleasure itself is an archive?
Who do we become when we stop asking empire for permission to exist?