Stedelijk Statements
QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO
Events — Feb 1, 2019
- Price
- Museumticket + €3.
A radical access plan will be implemented as part of this event: people that identify as a refugee, person of color, sex worker or those who identify as trans don’t pay admission. To facilitate this we will be using a guest list, please register via publicprogram@stedelijk.nl - Location
- Teijin Auditorium
- Time
- Feb 1, 2019, 6.30 pm until 9.30 pm
- Main language
- English
- Admission
- This event is sold out
QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO is the sixth edition of Stedelijk Statements, a program series in which a scholar, artist, critic, or cultural entrepreneur composes an evening at the museum. The organizer of the program takes the floor to share their views on visual art and design. New research and projects, both artistic and academic, will be presented during an evening program that can consist of lectures, debates, performances and film screenings.
QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO is a website and a series of live events in which queer artists, queer scholars, queer activists and a multitude of other queer voices present what queer means to them. By creating such a platform QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO wants to not only problematize prevailing and reductive ways of describing a body (male, female, gay, straight etc.), but mostly invent new, more nuanced and inclusive ways of being and becoming.
Queer is not a Manifesto, since queer is something that fundamentally defies the principle of categorization and classification. It proposes that singular definitions – for bodies and in general – are restrictive and often violent. Therefore the main question of this project reads as follows:
If queer is not a manifesto, then what could it be or become?
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ERIKA P. MARTIN/ MELVIS
Erika P./ MELVIS is a local drag king cabaret performer and queer event organizer. She has performed and toured with Black Circus Queer Cabaret, as well as with Amsterdam Drag Queers. She helps organize the weekly queer nights WTF Queer Wednesdays at Vrankrijk in Amsterdam, where the personal is political and politics get personal.
LIZ ROSENFELD
Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin-based artist who works with film/video and live performance. She explores questions regarding the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, past and future histories and the way in which memory is queered. She is part of the film collective NowMomentNow. Her films are represented by Video Data Bank and LUX Moving Image and have been screened in various international museums and theaters. She is currently performing in The Nature of Us, a group dance work choreographed by Jared Gradinger and Angela Shubot, slated to premiere at the Hebbel am Ufer Theater later this year. Her newest film work, WHITE SANDS CRYSTAL FOXES, will premiere at the Berlin Planetarium in late 2019.
In 2017 Liz Rosenfeld was Goethe Institute Artist In Residence at LUX Moving Image. She received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, followed by an MA from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 2007.
OLAVE BASABOSE
Olave Basabose is an artist who works in a variety of media, currently living and working in The Hague. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, Basabose makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented. Her work tries to express this with the help of physics and technology, but not by telling a story or creating a metaphor.
Her artworks demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the 20th century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own “cannibal” and “civilized” selves.
Her current and latest project is Olave Talks: an emerging new media initiative for and by queer activists, thinkers, doers and makers of color. Olave Talks is an uplifting and empowering platform designed to effectively and accessibly engage with complex political, philosophical, social, cultural, artistic and spiritual themes. Conversation and eating, as a vehicle and method of knowledge production, knowledge transfer and community building, is central to our liberators’ praxis. Olave Talks is unapologetically committed to the dismantling of the imperialist, capitalist, ableist, species cis-heterosexist, white supremacist patriarchy we are trapped in.
CARLOS MARTIEL
Carlos Martiel lives and works in New York and Havana. He graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts “San Alejandro,” in Havana in 2009. Between the years 2008-2010, he studied in the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, directed by the artist Tania Bruguera.
Martiel’s works have been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including the 14th Sharjah Biennial, UAE; 57th Venice Biennale, Italy; Casablanca Biennale, Morocco; Biennial “La Otra”, Colombia; Liverpool Biennial, UK; Havana Biennial, Cuba; the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba; Tornielli Museum, Ameno, Italy; Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has received several awards, including the Franklin Furnace Fund in New York, USA, 2016; “CIFOS Grants & Commissions Program Award” in Miami, USA, 2014; “Arte Laguna” in Venice, Italy, 2013.
SEBASTIAN DE LINE
Sebastian De Line is a queer, trans artist and scholar. He/they holds a BFA in Autonomous Fine Art from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and an MA in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute. Sebastian is currently a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies and a teaching fellow in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. His/their dissertation, “Postmortem Economies in Art: The Necropolitics of Value in Indigenized & Racialized Production”, investigates the manufacturing of economies which instill objecthood into kin through museum collections, produced by systems of colonial property production, that generate value through a necropolitical capitalization upon states of unliving.
His/their artistic practice primarily involves the presence and absence of agency or voice in embodied spaces.
CREDITS
Performer: Vita Evangelista
Facilitator: Bear Silver
Facilitator: Maria Guggenbichler
MAVI VELOSO
Mavi Veloso is a Brazilian artist based in Amsterdam working transdisciplinarily as a visual and performance artist, dancer, actress, singer and songwriter. A transgender migrant from South America to Europe, embodies and appropriates transformation processes, conflicts and cultural adaptation, as well as fashion, queer, trans and drag queen elements, in order to discuss gender, identity, sexuality, placement and displacement. Currently developing the project #iwannamakerevolution. Has presented works at the Van Abbemuseum, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Les Urbaines, 31st Biennial of São Paulo.
SEHAQ
SEHAQ is an independent Amsterdam-based queer refugees collective, founded in 2017, that focuses on community building, political awareness, and the creation of safer spaces for queer BPOC refugees in the Netherlands. SEHAQ means “dyke” or “dykeness” in Arabic. It is dedicated to the affirmation and the support of queer BPOC refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented people in their struggle against racial, heterosexual, gendered, and classed oppressions. It follows a nonhierarchical structure (or tries to) and its funding is based on donations. SEHAQ organizes events such as parties, dinners, performances, workshops, picnics, fashion shows, and also campaigns, actions and protests against the deportation of queer refugees, against EU migration policies, and against the Dublin agreement (an EU asylum law). They specifically focus on social justice. They aim to build a stronger queer BPOC refugee community and a larger grassroots movement in the Netherlands that is capable of challenging the structural oppressions that queer BPOC refugees face, and that adopts a leftist, feminist, and intersectional approach to politics.
VELVET DECEMBER
Velvet December is a queer sex worker and LGBTI+ activist (Pink Terrorists), working as a lesbian escort for De Stoute Vrouw. Passionate about female sensuality and adamant about improving sex workers' rights as the advocacy coordinator at PROUD, the Dutch union for sex workers, she hopes to change people's views on sex work with her personal, story-sharing approach.
The aim is specifically to not answer this question, but to instead embrace the diversity of all outcomes. QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO aims to create a space of radical imagination where a multitude of undefined positions can exist alongside one another.
QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO is first and foremost a digital podium. Anyone can contribute their interpretation of queer on www.queerisnotamanifesto.com. In the long run, the website functions as a living/ever-growing document that keeps a real-time account of what queer is or could become.
For the Stedelijk Statements launch of QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO the first 10-15 contributions will be presented live, running back to back to create a living collage of queer propositions. These propositions will take the form of lectures, performances, videos, fits of rage, sound pieces or any format that the presenter best feels supports their interpretation of queer. Contributors will include a mix of activists, artists and scholars that not only aim to disturb dominant notions of gender and sexuality, but also to strive for the disruption of prevalent colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal narratives. QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO abides to an intersectional vision. Any voice can feel unheard when speaking alone for their singular cause. QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO aims to interweave a multitude of voices and create a cross-dialogue that, when unified, strengthens the building of a movement.
MOTIVATION FOR RADICAL ACCESS PLAN
Carly Rose Bedford and Aynouk Tan, the curators of this evening, have chosen for a “radical access policy” in order to emphasize the systematic exclusion of, and to claim space for, “bodies and histories” that are structurally suppressed, as phrased by the two artists. The makers especially invite people who identify as queer, trans, refugee, sex worker or person of color to participate in this evening. They will receive a spot on the guest list. Everyone on the guest list enters free of charge. In addition, this three-hour event is accessible for anyone at a modest surcharge (€3,00). By choosing this form, the curators of this evening stress the significance of being exclusive. If you think you are also eligible to be placed on this list, you are very welcome to write us an email with your name and reason of request.
In addition, the makers state that QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO is set up to be a “failure”: decolonizing and queering the museum for just one night is not enough, and while various voices are included in the program, many are still missing.
The Stedelijk is not only a place for presentations and exhibitions, but also for producing new work and offering a platform for conversation and dialogue. This conversation is not always comfortable, equal or enjoyable. To the contrary: such contact is often the result of institutional critique and it is allowed to be awkward or uncomfortable, as the conventional distribution of roles between all players is questioned, attacked and taken apart.
The Stedelijk considers this event extremely valuable in our ambition toward an accessible and inclusive museum.
CREDITS
Creative Production: Carolin Gieszner
Lighting Technician: Marleen Heuvelmans
Dramaturgy: Naomi Pieter
Host and Afterparty: Mini Maxwell
QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO is generously supported by the AFK and Goethe Institute.
