Making Queer

Events:

Sunday, 9 February 2020, 12:00 –17:00
Workshop »I Can’t Believe I Have To Protest This Shit 2: Electrib Goobaloo« with Crab Content (pronoun: they)

A workshop on analyzing and creating viral online images, so-called ›memes‹

What does the Netflix algorithm have in common with the Dada movement? How do extremist groups weaponize a simple color combination online?

The first part of this workshop will be a presentation and discussion on how memes and memetic media have influenced politics and art in the last 100 years, in both left- and right-wing movements. The second half will be a meme-making extravaganza, where the participants will make memes together by using digital and IRL collage.

The internet is a maelstrom and it is pulling all of us with it. Maybe it is a good reflection of our times. As we approach the Roaring’ Twenties pt. 2, the wheel keeps turning, plunging us further into disintegration and furthermore, Dada times. Or neo-Dada times?

Yes, memes, the pictures with text anybody can make, are flooding the internet. Memes are the quintessential expression of an era, a new art form or a ready-made construct to be deployed for the lulz or to slowly poison other people’s minds. Let’s get lost in this unholy proliferation, explore the labyrinths of hate, and learn to recognize the traps set by those who know us better than ourselves.

Crab Content is a published author, meme-maker and scholar, and digital designer. They exhibited at the meme-based exhibition »Accessibility Note no. 5: Neodaddyism« at the GAVU in Prague with COVEN BERLIN in 2019, where this workshop format debuted as a part of the exhibition. This will be the second incarnation of that workshop.

Sunday-Friday, 31 May - 5 June 2020
Online-Workshop: »CREATURE BODIES AND PERFORMATIVE PERSONAS« with Laura Lulika and Hang Linton

Week-long performance workshop via Zoom video and Email, optional Telegram group
Language: English for the live week of workshops. Video content will be released in German shortly after.

A week-long series of online workshops aimed at guiding participants through the process of getting to know your inner creature body. Find ways to express your Otherness or parts of yourself suppressed by oppressive systematic structures. Deconstruct the culture of shame that constructs Otherness to find methods to be empathetic to these aspects of ourselves and to express them in a way which feels natural and positive using performative techniques. Through playful exercises in writing, costume, beat-making and movement, and using various performative techniques, we will encourage the creature out of you.

The workshop will draw upon somatic practices, afro-futurism, queer, drag & DIY performance culture with the intention to give simple tools which can be used to create performance personas. The workshop will encourage participants to use low cost items found at home or to up-cycle old possessions. The aim is to draw on personal experiences and share processes as interdisciplinary live artists. The workshop leaders and participants will explore and offer techniques in creating music, text, costume, and performance.
This workshop welcomes all levels of experience from complete beginner to performance veteran, or anyone who is considering taking a creative practice in a new direction.

Laura Lulika (pronoun: she), is a crip (sick+disabled) artist and researcher. Hang Linton (pronoun: he) is a musician, artist and performer. Together they have been collaborating to create audio visual performances in galleries, theaters, queer parties and festivals. Combining their skills in music, moving image and live performance, their otherness is expressed through two monstrous creatures. Their bodies are POLITICAL, SPIRITUAL, JOYFUL, SEXY and ANGRY. Their focus is on accessibility in the arts and finding ways to overcome access barriers, striving to be advocates for arts being accessible for everyone.

Saturday, 4 and Saturday, 7 July 2020, 16:00–20:00
Workshop »Queer stand-up comedy pedagogy - Laughter as a tool for collective healing« with Bard and Daddypuss Rex (en)

Performance:
Sunday, 12 July, from 19:00

Between the two workshop facilitators Bard and Daddypuss Rex the intersectionality abounds. Lower socioeconomic backgrounds? Check! Immigrant status? Yes. One Black, one Jew? Check, check! Queer & Trans? Very! B.C. (Before Corona), you could find these two on any given night performing poetry, spoken word and/or stand-up comedy on various stages, as well as hosting and producing their own late-night queer-trans centred talk show “Just The T”.

The aim of this workshop is to demonstrate how to use humour to playfully interact with often times painful, shameful, and “taboo” subjects. During the workshop the workshop leaders will explore what each participant wishes to express in their comedy through a variety of writing and performance exercises. The intention is to enable queer people to create humour from their own lived experiences - centering queer joy and queer laughter as a tool for collective healing.
The workshop will consist of 2 meetings of 4 hours each (on the 4th and 11th of July), and will culminate with each participant performing a 5-minute comedy set as part of a performance night on the 12th of July.

Monday, 3, Monday, 17 and Monday, 31 August, 18:00-19:30
Online-Workshop »Writing Bodies as Moving Bodies: How to use your own body to generate science fiction« with Clay and Isabel (de/en)

Starting from somatic practices and science fiction narratives as tools for world-making, Isabel and Clay are facilitating a workshop to explore how the body can catalyze writing and how movement can emerge out of writing. Asking the question: Can writing and moving be used as tools of resistance against the impact of institutionalized structures?

The sessions and the time in between are a space for exploration and imagination; to time travel, world build and weave relationships together. Through imagining bodies setting and movements, Isabel and Clay would like to focus on possibility and prefiguration as bridges between the past, present and future, as well as the writing and moving body. Thoughts and narratives can be an important strategy to deal within the circumstances of late capitalism and ever shifting precarious states, as a tool to map desired futures and embodied presents to build those from.
The workshop is accompanied by a reader with texts and images that will either be sent by mail to the participants or can be downloaded at the ngbk website.

The sessions are facilitated by Clay and Isabel. Clay is white and identifies as non-binary trans, queer and chronically ill. They are a somatic bodyworker, science fiction writer and dancer. Isabel is white and identifies as queer; she is a dramaturge for dance, and works as an artistic researcher at HFBK Hamburg in the project »Non-Knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image«.

Monday - Thursday, 19 - 22 October 2020
Workshop »I’m in Love with my Future« with Sanni Est

A workshop for LGBT+ youth to learn to make videos. To plan, direct, shoot, and edit a short video, from music video, to interview, to comedy? Many things are possible and whatever you can imagine!
Hosted in a queer space, we will imagine together: What is a queer future from the perspectives of youth today? What new possibilities can be realised in imagining our own futures, by us and for us?

Sanni Est is an artist, curator and trans*feminist speaker based in Berlin and with roots in North-Eastern Brazil. Making use of different media, Sanni weaves raw, (auto)biographical
narratives that range from filmmaking on queer BIPoC subjects from different parts of the world; singing-songwriting, acting, writing and speaking; whilst using her trans*brown body as a performative tool of expression to provoke the viewer and confront them with their colonial perceptions of gender performativity.

In cooperation with LAMBDA Jugendnetzwerk