In motion, we remember to resist

In motion, we remember to resist is grounded in the artist's personal experience of nearly being evicted from his queer home in Berlin. The ongoing project explores how practices of queer home-building can be adapted to serve as an act of resilience, resistance and how these instances of homes can be dignified even in the face of disappearance.

The research currently unfolds along two pathways. The first is an embodied practice rooted in historic queer dances such as Waacking and Voguing, as well as movement-based behaviors like cruising. These are examined as potentially embodied history, archival practices as well as possible modes of encoding memory through gesture. This research path foregrounds the queer gesture attached to architectural spaces queer people are forced to inhabit, activated through spontaneous choreographies that function as a means to archive, reflect and dignify these disappearing spaces.

The second pathway is a cinematic intervention that positions film as a potential, opaque site to transfer queer communities to and a way of resisting the linearity of heteronormative time. It explores the conditions of cinema as a container for queer homes and therefore a space for queer intimacy. Both strands of my research are informed by the work of queer theorists such as José Esteban Muñoz (particularly Cruising Utopia), Jack Halberstam’s concept of ‘scavenger’ methodology, Leo Herrera’s speculative archives and Maggie Nelson’s relational poetics.