Zachary Naylor
Livable Futures graduate student fellow 2023-2024
Visual Art, The Ohio State University
Biography
Zachary Naylor (b. 1993, Waterbury, CT) is a trash obsessed queerdo, based in Columbus Ohio (2025 MFA Candidate at OSU), currently exploring the wastescape, and how its existence allows for frictionless material, and social disposability. Through walking actions, and gatherings, it aims to trouble the mundane spaces where the continued performance of preexisting modes of living and being in the world are reinforced. This troubling is enacted through the phenomenological re-appearance of that which has been deemed worthy of disposal, of uselessness. Refuse. The wastescapes edges blurred.
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
I try to consider how any livable futures I imagine begin with me. This most certainty means beginning with the decision to find more opportunities to be amongst people. Isolation is something that I have experienced and do not want to return to. I recognize it as a condition that has malformed my sense of self and how that self engages with the world. I now understand isolation as a symptom of estrangement, a great distance that strategically separates me (I) from you (we). This estrangement extends into how I relate to my body, the earth, others, and material (especially its full lifecycle).
A livable future begins, for me, with challenging the mechanisms (capitalism, consumerism, patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism) that thrive in the distance of estrangement, and therefore have a vested interest in ensuring that the distance remains. The mechanisms that have shaped how I enter into relation with all things, beings, and places. My role in a more livable future is to be increasingly accountable for any and all ways that I participate in and uphold those mechanisms.
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
I am reading as much queer theory as possible, and thinking about plastic and oil through texts like Heather Davis’s Plastic Matter, and Madeleine Andersson’s communal publication Petrosexuality, which is an “effort to think about and reflect upon the fossil fuel industry and the culture it generates.” Otherwise I am constantly seeking out material that introduces me to new ways of thinking, and brings me closer to others.
What practices are sustaining you?
Gathering around food, conversation, and dance have been sustaining! Being in more collective // non-hierarchal spaces has been sustaining. Listening has been sustaining. Feeling, and not turning away from feeling has been hard but sustaining. All of these have worked in tandem to guide me towards a supportive network of folks I trust, and who I feel capable of being a more authentic version of myself around. Being a more authentic version of myself is sustaining.