The Arkansas Ozarks stretch along long, winding roads and quiet hills where visibility is never neutral. In Care Of: Cord, Arkansas, grew from this landscape, grounded in travel, attention, and care. Fieldwork drives the project: visiting homes and businesses displaying pride flags, leaving invitations for queer individuals to participate, and returning later to receive letters in my P.O. Box. The process is slow and patient, shaped by the rhythms of rural life and the demands of ethical attention.
The beauty of this work emerges through encounters. Pride flags are rare but significant, marking both presence and possibility. Letters arrive from unexpected places, often through networks of friends and acquaintances, each carrying memory, survival, joy, and fear. Re-typing each one on a manual typewriter becomes a quiet devotion, a way to thread together voices into a living archive.
This project is about attention as much as collection. The long roads, small towns, and occasional abandoned landscapes reveal persistence, vulnerability, and care. The connections formed, sometimes brief, sometimes intimate, show how queer life in rural spaces circulates in subtle, unexpected ways. Even in isolation, networks of trust endure.
From a futurity perspective, these letters are traces of possibility. They record lives as they exist now while gesturing toward what can survive into the future. Each letter and every mile traveled contributes to a relational archive that insists on presence, however fragile and partial.
In the Ozarks, queer life persists quietly and carefully. In Care Of: Cord, Arkansas traces that persistence, mapping networks not in streets or coordinates, but in attention, trust, and the fragile intimacies of correspondence.