The Many Headed Hydra

The Many Headed Hydra (TMHH) collective is dedicated to queer and feminist ecologies, myth making and situated practices that emerge from bodies of water. TMHH collaborates with inhabitants of different lands and seas to cross-connect queer*feminist and decolonial research, art making, and publishing. TMHH uses ritual and fiction, shape-shifting collectivities and storytelling to set resistant knowledges into motion. TMHH’s magazines are a performative device – they circulate as rumours, gatherings, printed matter, performances, exhibitions, radio broadcasts, evocations . . .

Moving through lands, cities and buildings, through intimate, forbidden and public spaces, through bodies and between lands and ever slipping from control or containment, bodies of water are linked to an imaginary of crossing, to movements of passage. Following the waters, a different cultural cartography appears – one that flows through the geography constructed by demarcations of national territories, of property and of linear histories. TMHH explores the waters as rhizomatic narrative space and as potential infrastructure of commons. Navigating puddles, rivers, fountains, oceans or pipes, tears, sweat, blood and spit TMHH propose to draw connections between different experiences, crossing temporalities and contested geographies.

The Many Headed Hydra was initiated in 2016 by visual artist Emma Wolf-Haugh (IE, DE) and Suza Husse (DE) at District, Berlin and has recently expanded to include the curator Aziz Sohail (PK, US) and artist/curator Bryndís Björnsdóttir (IS, DE) as part of the core collective.

Image: The Many Headed Hydra, Oracle Flags 2017. Hand dyed cotton flags, screen printed image, dimensions variable. Photo: Ros Kavanagh