Queer Ecologies
An iteration of Everything is Migrating—a project supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council—Zulu Padilla’s Queer Ecologies continues an intimate investigation of movement, desire, and kinship across species and geographies. Drawing from his lived experience as a migrant and from the migratory patterns of neotropical birds that cross borders freely, Padilla creates site-responsive installations that blur distinctions between natural and constructed worlds, queer and ecological spaces.
In this new iteration, presented as part of his SoMad residency for Mad World, Padilla traces bird flight and queer cruising within Prospect Park—two forms of navigation that evade fixed identities and challenge imposed boundaries. The work draws from photographs taken in these secluded spaces, where remnants like decomposing condoms, feathers, and plant matter become layered within large-scale collages and sculptural assemblages. These materials coalesce into organic forms that suggest nests, altars, or portals—structures of refuge, desire, and transformation.
Inspired by the Queer Ecologies Garden at the Alice Austen House, the installation honors gardens and green spaces as historic sanctuaries for queer communities, while also inviting reflection on the interdependence of all living beings. By intertwining the human and avian, Queer Ecologies evokes a shared multiplicity—each body, whether feathered or flesh, carries stories of migration, vulnerability, and becoming.
Everything is Migrating
Everything is Migrating is an exhibition whose central motif is the intersection between the neotropical migration of birds, and the resilient culture of gay cruising in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. This work allows multiple perspectives to unfold: poetic, political and psychological, embodying urgent visual participation through tension and ease between uprootedness, freedom and beauty. Medium scale, organic shaped-float-mount-frameless photographic mixed media pieces of birds and gay cruising activity is assembled to create this exhibition.
These two seemingly disparate natural phenomena intersect each Spring, Summer and Fall in the park where birds, birders and cruisers share the ground and soar in both the skies and in sexual ecstasies. One of the strangest intersections I make use of can be found in the hundreds of used latex condoms discarded in the dirt of the wooded areas in the park. They disintegrate until all that is left is a ring. This work proposes ways of looking at the dynamics of sharing space together and relating in sync, untangling the delusion of separation.
"Birds brought me to find words for the sensations and urgencies of belonging. If there is something I crave to belong to, it must be the love of exploration, the love and eros to the self, and the constant opening up of the self into the totality"
Exhibition open now through August 6th at theThe Compound Cowork Gallery
1120 Washington Ave - 2nd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11225
