Hi folks, friends and family,

If you are seeing this you’re likely already familiar with me and my work, but just in case: I’m Audax M. Gawler, a trans non-binary artist based in Narrm (Melbourne), Australia. My practice imagines and helps create earth futures that centre healthy ecological relations. I often do this through participatory and immersive worlds that let people rehearse living in the future. I am making a new work like that now, and I need your support to bring it into the world.

In one week I will open a new installation for the 6th Annual Trans Pride Fair and Conference in São Paulo, Brazil. The work, Mutō: Temple for Trans-Planetary Regeneration, imagines a future where rest and regeneration are not luxuries, but essential and sacred practices. The temple is a sacred site of regenerative practice, a collective chrysalis where old worlds dissolve and new futures are visioned into being. It is a living prototype for a future where regeneration is centred in culture itself, rehearsed through rest, ritual, and collective dreaming.

Mutō proposes to pay trans communities for their participation and their rest. We know that to create futures, we must first be resourced enough to rest and dream them. Mutō celebrates trans people as visionaries and as vital contributors to planetary futures because of their lived expertise in navigating transition. To honour this, each trans participant receives R$100 (about $30 AUD, equivalent to a day’s wage in hospitality here in São Paulo) to spend time in the temple.

This gesture matters deeply in Brazil, which has recorded the highest number of trans murders worldwide every year since 2008. While the project has government funding, it is a radical act to remunerate rest, and provocative that only trans dreamers are paid. As such, the funding does not extend to participants.

So we are calling on you, the global community of allies, artists, and futurists, to help us honour trans individuals who will serve as visionaries within this space, and to co-create a future where regeneration is revered.

Supporting Mutō means supporting trans communities, planetary futures, and ecological futures. The temple is modelled on the life cycles of butterflies and created in partnership with a local butterfly sanctuary. With pollinator populations rapidly declining, Mutō entwines their protection with cultural practice. Dreamers are led by butterfly lifeways, and on departure receive Milkweed seeds to plant, the only food eaten by the Southern Monarch butterfly, now increasingly at risk.

All donations will flow directly to the trans community of São Paulo, with any additional funds used to purchase more Milkweed seeds to support local butterfly populations. We have just one week to raise the funds needed to pay participants.

If you are able to contribute, I would be infinitely grateful, as will the trans community here who are exhausted, and eager for the rare chance to rest, recharge, and be remunerated for their very presence.

With all the uncertainty we face, and the rising global effort to build affirmative planetary futures where diverse life can flourish, my hope is that Mutō makes visible one possible future of care, rest, and regeneration.

You can see more info here, and the portal for brazilian donations.

https://ssexbbox.com/muto

and more on me and my work here

https://www.audaxaudax.com/

With deep gratitude,

Dax