Co-conveners: Tulio Colombo Corrêa (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Arthur Medrado (Universidade Federal Fluminense), Fredda Amorim (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto)
Working Group Description:
This working group is born from an essentially transdisciplinary platform: “Queerlombos.” Our name brings together theories gender and sexualities (queer) with socio-spatial historical structures of resistance to colonization and slavery (quilombos) self-organized by black people. Our proposal is to use the space of this working group to expand, together with others, the concept of “Queerlombos,” building on our collective experience and four years of work building what we consider to be a cultural movement born in the bowels of a colonial city.
With the expansion of the concept as a starting point, and grounded in “the building of communities and intimacies,” we will examine the other issues articulated in the call—“architecture and narrative,” “racialized space and spatialized race,” and “street art, interruptions and interventions”. We understand the crossroads of decolonial transdisciplinary practices as essential to addressing the complexity of this concept, and thus see the need to examine some of key issues/affects/powers that constitute the endless forms of (re)existence built by Queerlombos.
The working group will allow us to elaborate and consolidate this concept, incorporating other analytical frameworks from the academy as well as other socio-cultural practices converging education, art, and critical understandings regarding the production of space in contemporary cities in Latin America, especially in Brazil.
Description of the spaces of the Working Group:
Queerlombos is an open concept, under construction and in dispute. We therefore propose an initial meeting to redefine this concept based on the materials circulated beforehand and the experiences of each person who participates in the working group.
The first moment, then, will be an open listening space, in which we will build collective understandings about Queerlombos based on the multiple realities of the people present.
In the second moment, we will interrogate our private and collective experiences in relation to the three themes proposed—art, education, and space—based on our dialogue and on the affects present in our narratives, At this stage, we will begin to build our materials drawing on everything that has been spoken and heard.
In the third moment, we will analyze the materials developed in order to practice a critical, collective perspective, built in the other moments of the working group.
In the fourth moment, we propose to host an open public discussion (such as a conference, lecture, or masterclass) with an important figure in theLGBTQIA+ community that has strong connections with the themes proposed in the working group. This public dialogue will address the themes discussed and enhance our proposal for Queerlombos in the Americas. A possible guest is Argentine singer and activist Susy Shock.
In a fifth moment, and this will be done virtually, we will ask for materials and narratives from working group participants that will be used for the authoring of an article based on this experience. The photo and video materials that will be shared and collected in the workgroup will be presented on digital platforms such as the website www.queerlombos.org and on the website of the Hemispheric Institute .
It is always worth mentioning that we are experiencing a crisis in the territories of the Americas, a brutal erasure of the peoples’ histories and autonomies due to the expansion of neoliberalism. The intention of this work is to think critically about other forms of political-affective articulation in opposition to the destructive reason imposed by financial capitalism.
Expected results:
We will produce spaces for multiple understandings about Queerlombos, as well as an open masterclass to enhance the convergence programming. In addition to the content (texts, videos, and photos) that will be produced and presented during the meetings, the organizers of the working group propose to edit a text to be published in academic-article format following the working group experience.
About Queerlombos:
The Queerlombos Collective Platform was born from the need to build spaces for encounter, affect, research, aesthetic/artistic expression and, above all, resistance through culture. We created a collective process of articulation to enable events that connect diverse people around the will and the possibilities of these meetings. We started something that we can call a cultural movement. Ouro Preto, the cradle of this movement, is a world heritage city and is a site of many controversies—dissonant in relation to the meanings that its population attributes to its monuments and stories. Our concern about approaches to diversity and coloniality begins there!
For more information, visit www.queerlombos.org