GUN SALT TURTLE SEED is an artistic-research project that speculates on queer survival and non-reproductive futures: In 1727, the Zeewijk, a ship under the flag of the Dutch East India Company, was shipwrecked on a reef near the West Australian Coast. After its crew found rescue on Gun Island, two boys were accused of homosexual acts and sentenced to death and marooned on separate barren islands nearby. They share fate with the more widely known Leendert Hasenbosch, another Dutch sailor who, accused of the same “crime”, was marooned in the Atlantic Ocean two years earlier. Left with a only handful of seeds, a pan and a barrel of water, Hasenbosch managed to survive over six months. He kept a diary that was later discovered together with a deserted campsite. The project takes the seemingly coherent end of these stories – the unwitnessed death of the protagonists – as starting point for the development of a futurist narrative: fiction is the vessel that allows to reinvent queer death as speculative futurity.

GUN SALT TURTLE SEED was realized with the help of  Bayern Innovativ and the production grant "Junge Kunst und neue Wege."