Friday, May 24th, 2024, 12pm
Kreuzberger Kinderstiftung, Ratiborstr. 14a, 10999 Berlin
This event will take place in German and English spoken language as well as German Sign Language.
Of course, queer of color critique is not homogeneous and there is not just one line. However, the lines often only appear fleetingly, are sometimes clearer, sometimes ephemeral, sometimes missing points on the line or stations along the way that once existed but have disappeared due to erasure, forgetting, repression, violence or pandemics.
– Dr. Rena Onat
Queer of Color Critique initially means a critical perspective of queer and BIPoC positioned people. Although there is no homogenous group of Queers of Color, this term is currently used mainly by QTIBIPoCs (QueerTransInter* AND Black Indigenous People of Color). There is a common ground of being affected by racism as well as homophobia and/or transphobia. This also means that there are shared experiences and common strategies of resistance, survival and empowerment.
Queer of Color Critique has been a recurring theme in the spaces of xart splitta, for example in the reading group of the same name or most recently in the publication of Rena Onat’s dissertation “Queer Artists of Color”. In addition to the critiques themselves, the people who formulate these critiques are also at the centre of our discussion here. This is another reason why we are drawing a direct line here from the (academic) discourse aspect of Queer of Color Critique to (activist) identity (formation).
With various formats such as input, panels and workshops, we hope to create questions of knowledge transfer within intersectional communities and sciences at the symposium and to be able to pursue a renewed contextualisation and challenge in the German context.
The processes around knowledge about intersectional discrimination and life realities, the remembrance of activist struggles, people or places that are/were affected by structural erasure will be fundamental for a common remembrance and exchange.
Programme:
12:00 pm – 12:45 pm Arrival & Welcome
12:45 pm – 1:15 pm Welcome & Input by Dr. Rena Onat
1:15 pm – 1:45 pm Keynote by Jin Haritaworn
1:45 pm – 2:30 pm Break
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm Workshops
3:30 pm – 4:00 pm Break
4:00 pm – 4:30 pm Documentation of the Queer of Color Critique Keynotey by Dr. Chandra Frank & Gayatri Gopinath, 2021
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm Panel
Our Workshops
Workshop #1 with Sailesh Naidu: Poetic Collage
The workshop will take place in English spoken language, interpretation into German Sign Language or German spoken language are possible.
Participants will craft visual poetry on the topics of identity, resistance, and change.
Workshop #2 with Okan Kubus: Labels and intersectional Identitys: Perspectives of Queer of Color and Sign Language users
The workshop is open to people with at least basic sign language skills, e.g. who have completed at least 120 hours of a DGS course. The workshop will take place in German Sign Language and will be supported by interpretation.
I am already confronted with this on a linguistic level: Let’s assume I find a community that I feel I belong to, or at least should feel I belong to, and enter into contact with it. First, there seems to be no language barrier; I can communicate with the members of the community in a language that is available to both sides. Then, however, I quickly realise that other identities of mine are not present in this community, are not lived and/or are not accepted. On a linguistic level, this means that there are simply no shared signs that I can use to describe my identities. I cannot give myself a sign language label or assign myself to one because I cannot even express certain dimensions of my identities in sign language in this community. In such situations, I am therefore forced to fall back on the linguistic means/resources that we share. For me, this means that I sometimes have to label and present myself as something that I am not necessarily exclusively. This means that I cannot linguistically show, present and express myself as Okan with all my multidimensional identities and be perceived accordingly.
This incomplete perception of my multidimensional identities and limited linguistically shared resources leads to experiences of discrimination for me. The visual aspect of sign languages, which is an essential part of the language but can also serve stereotypes to some extent, means that I am labelled as something with which I do not identify.
In this workshop, I would like to enter into an exchange with the participants and look together for strategies regarding sign language expressions. On the one hand, with regard to how we can deal with the presence of our diverse identities in certain spaces and communities and with labels that are ascribed to us by other people and, in a further step, even turn them away from us through alternative and appropriate sign language expressions.
Workshop #3 with Layla Zami: Crea(c)tive Empowerment
The workshop will take place in German spoken language. Music and sound will play a central role. We can offer translations into English spoken language.
What role models are there for Queer of Colors in the field of music? And how can we get creative ourselves in order to design and activate a Queer of Colour dream (/) space? In this workshop, we will write creatively, exchange ideas about music history and also move a little. No previous knowledge is required and all bodies are welcome. The motto of this workshop is ‘no judgement of self or others’.
Workshop #4 with Sunanda Mesquita: Dreaming communities: a get- together for community organisers
The workshop will take place in English spoken language, interpretation into German Sign Language or German spoken language are possible.
In this session Sunanda Mesquita will hold space for exchange and connection between community organisers, while centering and drawing inspiration from vast individual and collective resourcefulness and the supportive communities and lineages we are a part of. Dreaming Communities is a space to recharge, to be inspired and to be reminded that especially in these challenging times we can find solace in the abundance of support available to us at all times. You are invited to bring your favorite quotes, books, or references that have supported you in your organising and that foster clarity, openness, love, and compassion. Throughout the session, there will be opportunity for rest and quiet contemplation as well as the invitation to connect with each other in smaller groups.
Information on registration
Register at contact@xartsplitta.net until May 16th, 2024. Registration is possible via text, video and audio.
This event is a Safer Space and is explicitly aimed at people who position themselves as queer/trans/inter* and as BIPOC.
We kindly ask you to write something yourself when registering:
- Which workshop would you like to take part in?
- Why did you decide to take part in the workshop?
- How have you dealt with the topic so far?
- Do you have any needs or require support to participate (e.g. language assistance, interpretation etc.)?
Please come tested to the event and stay home in the case you are showing symptoms.
Our Guests
Rena Onat is an art and media studies scholar with a focus on Queer of Color Critique in visual culture. She positions herself as a German-Turkish femme and she recently finished her PhD thesis on “Queer Artists of Color. Negotiations of Disidentification, Survival and Un-Archiving in the German Context.” She has worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Media Studies at HBK Braunschweig and at the Helene Lange-Kolleg Queer Studies and Intermediality: Art – Music – Media Culture at the University of Oldenburg. Since 2023 she is the central women’s representative at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. She also teaches seminars and is giving lectures and workshops on art, empowerment and antidiscrimination and she likes horses.
Okan Kubus (none/none), deaf himself, queer, non-binary and with a Turkish background, has held the professorship for sign language interpreting at Magdeburg-Stendal University since 2019 and is both multilingual and socialised within different cultures.
Sailesh Naidu (they/them) is a writer, filmmaker, and researcher who explores the relationship between the deeply personal and the deeply connected. They spent the last decade working in the field of education and forced migration with a focus on gender and sexuality. In 2016 they were awarded the prestigious German Chancellor’s Fellowship and served under mentorship of Office Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2021 their debut short film “DogFriend” which they created and produced was awarded funding by the German Ministry of Arts and Culture. “DogFriend ” had its world premier at the British Film Institute, was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival and was nominated for the German LOLA in 2022. Collectively their works and writing has been featured in the NYTimes, Die Zeit, The Schwules Museum, Gropius Bau, Urania Berlin, LiteraturHaus Berlin, DADDY Magazine, GALDEM, Volksbühne Berlin, among many others.
Dr. Layla Zami (Paris, 1985) is an innovative academic and interdisciplinary artist. She is Postdoctoral Researcher in Performance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (CRC Intervening Arts ) and was Adj. Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute, where she co-chaired Black Lives Matter at Pratt. Zami is the author of Contemporary PerforMemory (2020), and her work orbits around the nexus of cultural memory, corporeality, performance, diaspora, language, and spacetime. She was a keynote speaker/performer at HKW (Sonic Vernacular 2023), SOCARE (2022), and BGHRA (2018). As an Interdisciplinary Resident Artist with her wife’s company Oxana Chi Dance & Art, Layla Zami creates and performs music, sounds, spoken words and physical theater. The duo gratefully and gracefully performed and presented across the globe.
Sunanda Mesquita (they/them) born 1985, is a Vienna based, Goan-Swiss transdisciplinary visual artist, curator and Āyurvedic Wellness practitioner. Mesquita studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and is co-curator of Anti-Colonial Fantasies and co-founder of WE DEY x SPACE a QTIBIPOC centered art space in Vienna. (decolonialkilljoy.com)
Their artistic practice focuses on the possibilities of a radical, utopian, queer feminist collectivity of BIPoCs and topics of community, solidarity and belonging. They support individual and collective journeys to wellbeing by offering Āyurvedic bodywork and holistic knowledge centering decolonial joy within the diaspora. (@decolonial_joy)
Koray Yılmaz-Günay is the Co-Managing Director of Migrationsrats Berlin, an umbrella organisation of over 80 self-organised migration organisations and organisations of Black people and People of Color. He also works in extracurricular political education, especially in critical race. Yılmaz-Günay has been socially and politically active since the early 1990s, especially in critical race and capitalism critique movements as well as queer movements, for a long time with GLADT e.V., an NGO of queer People of Color. He has worked in political education since the mid-1990s and between 2011-2016 was a migration consultant at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung’s Academy for Political Education. His activist/publicist commitment led to the founding of the publishing house Yılmaz-Günay in 2015.
Joining us digitally will…
Jin Haritaworn grew up at Queer of Color kitchen tables in London and Berlin. Jin currently lives between Berlin and Toronto/Tkaronto/Three Fires Territory, where Jin is an Associate Professor at York University. Jin has written two books, including ‘Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places’, about racism and gentrification in queer communities in Berlin in the 2000s and 2010s. Jin has also co-edited several anthologies, including ‘Queer Necropolitics’. Their last three collections as well as the blog MarvellousGrounds.com were co-published with the Marvellous Grounds collective and co-authored with community members in Tkaronto, aiming to archive QTBIPOC’s contributions to social movements there. Jin has made seminal contributions to German- and English-language debates on subaltern spaces, homonationalism, intersectionality, neoliberal cities, police violence/abolition and trans/queer of color theories.
Within the screening of the documentation of the Queer of Color Critique reading circle 2021 we welcome back into the space:
Dr. Chandra Frank is a feminist researcher who works on the intersections of archives, waterways, gender, sexuality and race. Her curatorial practice explores the politics of care, experimental forms of narration, and the colonial grammar embedded within display and exhibition arrangements. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, exhibition catalogues and art publications, including Feminist Review, the Small Axe VLOSA catalogue, The Place is Here, Tongues, Foam Magazine and Stedelijk Studies. Chandra recently co-edited a special issue on Archives for Feminist Review. She is working on her monograph, Glimmers of Place: Queer Feminist Archives, Diaspora and Tidal Politics (working title), and is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Centre at the University of Cincinnati.
Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia.
The event takes place within the framework of the LADS-funded project #CommunitiesSolidarischDenken.