Athens Festival of Queer Performance aims at presenting different strands of the booming local scene of queer performance, as well as establishing a dialogue with an international array of performers, artists and academics working on live and media performance art. It is organised by a group of queers (artists, curators and theoreticians) who are connected to the contemporary art scene and are related creatively to other queer events and projects in Athens such as the Sound Acts festival, Glam Slam and Queer Ink as well as local queer feminist movements.
We are interested in exploring any co-existence and dialogue between different disciplines that can form a performance (conceptual art, body art, devised theatre, video art, drag show, musical acts, spoken word etc etc) and their connection with queer, feminist practices and theories, queer communities, individuals and their thematics of interest.
In this context, we aim to present performances, happenings, academic presentations, workshops and screenings which focus on the hybrid dimensions of the notion of queer. We are interested in presentations which embody personal stories and common narratives, multiple truths, hysteria, failure, ridiculousness, togetherness, anti-essentialism and are nourished by intersectionality, pop, political action, DIY, collage, humour and trauma.
The festival’s production is exclusively funded by self-organised events and an international online fundraising campaign and without corporate sponsorship. All funds gathered will go towards supporting the performers and to cover the technical set-up. The organisational team of the festival are volunteering their time. The festival will take place on the 18,19,20 of October 2019 at the KET space in Kypseli, Athens.
We invite proposals for performances, lectures, performative lectures, workshops and video screenings that relate to the following:
-fluidity: gender, sexuality and performativity
-queer art of failure as criticism to the ultra-serious/existential narrative of an art history made of “men geniuses”
-trans narratives, history and futures
-feminism and new forms of education
-femininities: expression, performativities and visibility
-queer parenthood
-anti-hellenism: neoliberalism, greekness, national marches and macedonian halva
-black embodiment, resistance, afrofuturism
-fatness: feminisms, hyper/invisibility, excess
-theories of “health” and well-being and the mechanisms of pathologisation
-opportunist “queerometers” and thoughts on the reappropriation and institutionalisation of queer issues
-bdsm, taboo, (post)pornography
-towards a new resistance: queer communism and queer anarchy
-counter violence, high heel kicks and/or molotov cocktails
-internalised sexism
-games as a form of queer expression
-anti-art, over identification and subversive affirmation strategies against the new dystopian reality of post-truth
-the limits and shortcomings of queer and identity politics
-street (in)security and self-defense
-the crossroads between spectacle and political critique
-queer mourning and collective trauma
*For the selected proposals from abroad we will organise solidarity accommodation lists and we will also suggest queer-friendly houses/spaces. The Athens Festival of Queer Performance is against the gentrification waves of AirBnb practices.