Queered Futures Lab is an interdisciplinary community gathering around a shared interest in critically queering pasts, present and futures through writing, performance, and conversation. We believe that storytelling is an essential muscle we need to train to envision more playful and regenerative futures.
We experiment with queered methodologies of storytelling, testing collaborative forms of performative writing techniques that activate the collective imagination, body, other senses and alternate logics in the writing process. Emerging in/from these practices are forms of feminist, decolonial, science fiction storytelling that reach for near and far possibilities of queerness, technology, bodies, gender, ecology and community.
What are we interested in?
Queerness
We gather around the notion of queerness as a mode of resisting futures built for us around compulsive and unquestioned heteronormativity. Our lived experiences of marginalisation but also of queer joy and community forms the backbone of our sharing during the sessions and becomes the kindling from which we build our past, present and future narratives. Embedded into our discussions is also a critical reflecting on queerness and what it means to future from a queer perspective.Futurism
We are particularly committed to discussing the idea of ‘futurity’ critically. How do we imagine the future without neglecting the urgency of the present? How do we relate to the past in our futuring? Can we adopt a practise of speculative presentism? We have before described our approach as ‘backwards facing futurism’. For us, this is a methodology of orienting ourselves towards desirable futures while still facing the tensions of the past, incorporating memories and ancestry into our storytelling in order to destabilise the compulsive future orientation of the progress narratives that dominate science fiction. We juggle with the axioms of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’, unraveling linear timelines while assembling queer ones and become excited about thinking of temporality at a multitude of scales and directions.Entanglement
We are interested in experimental writing practises that negotiate an expanded notion of authorship. How can writing be something that emergences through an interaction with an ‘other’? Writing not as a ‘thing’ but as an event, as a collection of relationships and occurrences. We look for ways of writing through entanglements with the other.Liminality
Our practise not only traverses thresholds, but is also contained within them. Queer Futures is nestled in the vast space between here and there, you and me, now and then and the writing we are interested in also seeks out this muddy liminality, looking for contested boundaries and dysfunctional membranes. Our futures are built in grey spaces on continually rearranging grounds.Anarchic Digitality
We explore the cracks between the physical and digital, testing analog methods of inhabiting space virtually. We see the internet as an anarchic liminal space that permits us to traverse permeable borders, boundaries and binaries in ways that are not usually permitted in non-virtual space.How do I join?
You can join at any point, there is no official membership or joining fee, simply come along to our next session. Sign up here to join our telegram network where you will find the link to the sessions.
In 2024, we focus more on physical meetings, with a few in-person workshops held in Berlin and Amsterdam, working towards a larger, multi-authored project.
About the organisers:
Dani Williamson (she/they)
Dani Williamson is a Haifa-based multi-disciplinary artist working across the fields of film / video art / installation / sound / text to make digital, interactive, and celluloid experimental works which primarily explore questions of “place-ness” and the phenomenology of the in-between.
Recent projects include sound-responsive video performances that engage with surrounding communities, musicians, and immediate locations.
www.daniwilliamson.net
Miche O’Higgins (she/her)
Miche O’Higgins is a Berlin based designer investigating queer ecologies and posthuman reproductive futures through immersive technologies and installation.
She has an emerging performance practice where she explores themes of mutation and transformation, exploring beastly presentations of gender and experimenting with various non-human forms of roleplay.
www.michelleohiggins.com
