In this glossary, queer artist duo Die Blaue Distanz traces emotional, spatial, and temporal connections between diverse queer ways of living and learning. The glossary entries are based on conversations, field notes, found footage, told memories, shared practices, and findings from bars, archives and protagonists e.g. in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tbilisi, New York, Berlin, Dresden, and Amsterdam.
Writer and art historian Amelia Groom interviews art collective Yangamini (meaning “holes” in Tiwi) about the spiritual, historical, practical, political, and sexual meanings of holes, the need to offer refuge to First Nations sexual minorities, and the butt plug sculptures they make, which draw attention to the extractions that threaten these communities.
Imagine this syllabus as a stalk with two leaves, each with its direction of reach: one that invites reflection on the way imperial projects have leveraged botanical knowledge for the purposes of indigenous dispossession and global extraction; and another that gathers dispersed practices of gardening which refuse colonial modernity’s exhaustion of land and labour, along with its humorless fetishization of heterosexual reproduction as the holy grail of social value.
De Vries uses Sylvia Wynter’s insights to model artistic, social and activist practices that challenge institutional and capitalist norms, fostering new forms of understanding, existence, and social relations.
In 2019, Maia Gattás Vargas and Francisca Khamis Giacoman met in the West Bank, where Khamis Giacoman was on a residency in Birzeit, and Gattás Vargas was filming her documentary Viento del Este (2023). Their project involves a dialogue through letter exchanges, exploring diverse memories of water in occupied Palestinian territories.
Groom explores seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan van Goyen's work as an analogy for the ongoing tension between land reclamation and the swamp's natural reclamation. The piece connects these historical efforts to contemporary reflections on how muddy, chaotic environments challenge rigid structures and boundaries, embodying resilience and subversion.
Inspired by the indigenous concept of comunidad, Balvanera's work incorporates practices of commoning, shared land responsibility, and protecting (agro)biodiversity. A key aspect is tequio, a traditional method of organising collective work for community benefit, fostering solidarity and cooperation against individualism that advocates for unity and mutual aid in increasingly commodified environments.
This article accompanies the first in a series of mixtapes inspired by European pre-industrial work-song cultures and explores when and how rural labour songs in Europe became tools for political consciousness, highlighting subversive, proto-feminist narratives.
By exploring the historical practice of stone cutting in Italy's Apennine Mountains, Damiani draws parallels to the resilience and transformation within us. Just as stone splitters read fault lines and work with tension, we, too, can find strength in our fractures, and embracing our vulnerabilities can lead to profound solidarity and revolutionary imagination.
This article delves into the parallels between the Colonies of Benevolence (1818-1825, NL) and historical plantation systems, examining their shared foundations in economic exploitation and social control. It seeks to uncover alternative histories and foster a deeper understanding of the land, labour, and cultural resilience by rethinking the colonies as plots of resistance within an imperial system.