A Seminar on Cuir/Queer Approaches to Knowledge Sharing Through Performance

Inspired by Minna Salami’s reflections on the notion of sensuous knowledge, the seminar will centre artistic practices as discursive elements in their own right. The gathering will find alternate means to position narratives and ways of sharing knowledge, circumventing rigid academic models and challenging Europatriarchal knowledge structures.

Encouraged by cuir/queer methodologies, the seminar investigates ways of cuiring/queering knowledge production within art institutions through the collective experience of performance by and with invited artists and collectives who reflect around these notions. The seminar brings a cuir approach to the forefront, proposing a kaleidoscopic understanding of queerness from different points of view.

Malin Arnell and Mar Fjell, who join together to become an interdisciplinary art worker, explored conditions for participatory practices in territorial environments by emphasizing the sticky shivers of (self-) touching through vibrating togetherness. The transdisciplinary group La Pocha Nostra, joined by performers La Saula, Balitronica Gómez, and Gerardo Juárez, and Pocha guest artists Muza de la Luz and Cecilio Orozco are known for practicing an intense collaboration across national borders, race, gender, and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means for creating ephemeral communities of rebel artists. Writer, poet and social activist Mabell Holand held a poetry intervention on the topics of intersectionality, trans identity, and violence of trans bodies. Elina Waage Mikalsen explores themes of identity and exclusion, collecting stories, fragments and sounds to work around the holes in Sámi history, caused by the Norwegian assimilation process. Mikalsen hosted an off-site sonic session in Jiennagoáhti (Lyttegammen) – et kunstverk dedikert til lytting i Bergensfjellet, an art in public space project initiated by Elin Már Øyen Vister in dialogue with Bergen Samiid Searvii and Joar Nango dedicated to listening. Jiennagoáhti is co-produced by Lydgalleriet, Bergen City Council and Byfjellsforvalteren and supported by KORO, Arts Council Norway and Bergen City Council. The goáhti is constructed by Ole Muosát /Sámihouse. Jiennagoáhti will have it's official opening in February 2023.

A screening of the film Brincando el Charco: Portrait of a Puerto by Frances Negrón-Muntaner will concluded the programme on Friday, and on Saturday, the programme ended at Landmark with a queer multi-disciplinary event curated by Kaeto Sweeney with special guests Safia Bahmed-Schwartz, DJ Amina Oui, and Dj Julie Silset.

Sensuous knowledge is kaleidoscopic, meaning that it can be understood as something that can coexist with other ways of sharing knowledge (with/within), rather than a binary setting (either/or). Sensuousness is a method to imagine paths, through which a “language that does not yet exist” can be created and can take form in poetry, playfulness, borderless, conscientiousness, dialogue, warmth, passion, compassion and many more.

The idea of thinking from/with/within, is reinforced by Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of nepantla, and can be translated as a “way of being between waters”. These displacements, not only geographical, but also as subjectivities and identities, offer a unique position to observe and experience another understanding of being. These perspectives that disidentify from heteronormative and hegemonic structures, allow, as scholar Sarah Ahmed proposes, the possibility of making connections through desire lines and creating queer –and cuir– landscapes for a future that is yet to come, as suggested by the late Cuban scholar, José Esteban Muñoz. The spelling of Cuir is a way to phonetically re-appropriate the concept of queer from Latin American Spanish, adding intersectional and decolonial perspectives.

In their entirety, these displacements, as Paul B. Preciado suggests, reflect not only on the radical transformation of both the traveling body and of the society that either receives or rejects them, but also on the structures created to shape and maintain a notion of citizenship and humanity.

‘Gestures and Nods. A Seminar on Cuir/Queer Approaches to Knowledge Sharing Through Performance’ is curated by Itzel Esquivel/Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and organised in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall. Discussion partners Giovanna Espossito, Liv Brissach, Martina Petrelli and Minna Salami.

Malin Arnell and Mar Fjell participation is supported by IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee´s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts.