Slugs: A Manifesto

Why be a slug? Slugs: A Manifesto explores a creature that survives by being disgusting. Weaving together manifesto, memoir and poetic language, Abi Palmer considers the politics of space, iridescent queerness, and shapeshifting viscous ‘slug time.’ In the face of a potential apocalypse, Slugs: A Manifesto envisions a future where humanity becomes just a little more sluglike.

Abi Palmer is an artist and writer. She uses​ film, text, sculpture and sensory intervention​ to explore sick bodies, viscous textures &​ ecological landscapes. Works include film series​ Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Artangel, 2023);​ book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020);​ and interactive gambling arcade Crip Casino. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern,​ Somerset House, Frieze Corridor and Venice Biennale

Praise:

"All hail Abi Palmer’s Slugs: A Manifesto, at once an addictive art world gossip column, a crip phenomenology, and a glistening, utopian theory of gender, queerness and desire. From these sticky trails the slug emerges as a slippery figure of dissent and persistence, whose very provocation of disgust ensures its survival. Palmer’s ode to the slug — sexy, mucosal and complicated — is essential reading for anyone interested in the headfucky negotiations of being a body.” - Daisy Lafarge

"Abi Palmer has sliced something so delicate and unwieldy into perfectly matched halves and it is like an actual real genuine magic trick. The best kind of fiction, the best kind of art — the kind that makes you blink in surprise at the world around you, not quite sure what’s real and what’s going on, but also: you love it. ” - Zarina Muhammad / The White Pube