About Queercircle: CIO and Registered Charity 1194564

We commissioned Fragments of a Queer Radical Mapping Praxis, a participatory research project exploring the idea of queer creative health through experiments in radical mapping praxis - collective mapping practices that build on counter- and anti-mapping traditions to challenge the social structures that drive health inequities for queer communities. Alongside the research, the Desire Lines season brought these questions to our communities through artist-led workshops, gatherings and collective practices, enabling them to encounter, test and contribute to the inquiry through public programming.

We commissioned Fragments of a Queer Radical Mapping Praxis, a participatory research project exploring the idea of queer creative health through experiments in radical mapping praxis - collective mapping practices that build on counter- and anti-mapping traditions to challenge the social structures that drive health inequities for queer communities. Alongside the research, the Desire Lines season brought these questions to our communities through artist-led workshops, gatherings and collective practices, enabling them to encounter, test and contribute to the inquiry through public programming.

Working with Maia Ardalla and Resolve Collective, we delivered a four-week programme exploring the practical infrastructure needed to sustain grassroots organising, from governance and fundraising to shared resources. Around 100 people registered online, with learning gathered into a shared digital resource library for organisers.

Following the expansion of our Catalyst programme, we brought representatives from our resident groups together to form a Building Collective; identify shared needs, exchange resources and develop relationships across their work. Groups using QUEERCIRCLE began to move from individual relationships with the organisation towards an interconnected network capable of learning, organising and acting together.

We established a paid Advisory Committee, bringing artists, organisers, researchers and community practitioners into the ongoing development of QUEERCIRCLE. By creating a paid route into institutional decision-making alongside our voluntary Board, the Committee challenged who could afford to participate in governance and enabled community knowledge and lived experience to influence our organisational strategy.

We began developing an Emergent Strategy with our communities, dedicating a year to action, reflection and collective learning about QUEERCIRCLE’s future. Rather than consulting on a strategy developed in advance, the process itself became part of our programme, with priorities emerging through research, residencies, governance experiments and relationships across our communities.

Across six intergenerational gatherings, trans and non-binary people of different ages came together to exchange lived experience, skills, histories and strategies for navigating trans life. TransGenerations created a reciprocal space for knowledge to move in multiple directions, culminating in a toolbox-shaped time capsule of tools gathered through trans life.

Zanele Muholi’s portraits of Black queer women, trans and non-binary people became the starting point for a season exploring belonging, estrangement, gender and intergenerational knowledge across exhibition, Creative Health, political education and young people’s activity. Alongside Estrangement and TransGenerations, Destroy the Gender Regime used a distributed curatorial model, commissioning a lead practitioner who invited other artists, organisers and thinkers to shape and lead the programme.

The season marked our shift towards developing arts, health, learning and youth programmes around shared enquiries rather than as parallel strands, while continuing our experimentation with distributing curatorial agency.

Across six intergenerational gatherings, trans and non-binary people of different ages came together to exchange lived experience, skills, histories and strategies for navigating trans life. TransGenerations created a reciprocal space for knowledge to move in multiple directions, culminating in a toolbox-shaped time capsule of tools gathered through trans life.

We expanded our Catalyst programme, recruiting 20 LGBTQ+ groups to use QUEERCIRCLE on a regular monthly basis; moving from ad-hoc free space towards sustained relationships with grassroots organisations. The programme began establishing an ecology of groups sharing the same infrastructure, from which the Building Collective subsequently emerged.

We brought grassroots organisations, organisers and communities together to raise funds for Palestine Solidarity. The fair reflected our growing role in connecting and resourcing a wider ecology of queer grassroots infrastructure.

We launched 200 Friends, inviting individuals to collectively sustain QUEERCIRCLE through regular giving and reducing reliance on institutional funding alone. The scheme extends our experiments with ethical fundraising by asking how the people who believe in the organisation might also participate in sustaining its infrastructure.

PJ Annand and Stef Garasto worked with communities and peer organisations to investigate how institutions collected data about gender and sexuality. The resulting Queer Data Report & Manifesto proposed more ethical approaches to LGBTQ+ data and informed changes to our own data and evaluation practices.

Through Real to Reel, ten film and moving-image organisations collectively curated fifteen free screenings; Queer East then took over the gallery with Guttural–Fleshless, bringing together five East and Southeast Asian artists alongside talks, workshops and knowledge-sharing. Together, the programmes shifted our role from centralised curation towards sharing space, resources and curatorial infrastructure with other queer cultural organisations.

Working with Trans Chorus and queer vocal practitioners, Queering the Voice used embodied vocal practice to explore gender, expression, wellbeing and liberation. Learning from the programme later extended into research and a podcast, allowing knowledge generated through practice to circulate more widely.

Our second major collaboration with Queer Youth Art Collective, Dream This Silly, received around 200 submissions, accepted every work and exhibited 114 young artists. Alongside this, Transifesto brought research with trans and non-binary young people into the development of future provision.

After months of community casting and production supported at QUEERCIRCLE, Teresa Margolles’ Mil Veces un Instante was unveiled on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, incorporating casts of hundreds of trans and non-binary people. The project demonstrated how community-based cultural infrastructure could contribute to the production of one of the UK’s most visible public artworks.

We brought practitioners together to test two peer networks. The Queer Creative Health Network created space for practitioners to exchange methodologies and learn through each other’s practice, while the Queer Arts Network brought artists, galleries, curators and writers together to explore cross-sector solidarity, shared challenges and what might become possible through greater connection. Together, the networks tested our role as a connector: creating infrastructure for practitioners to build relationships, exchange knowledge and explore solidarity across their fields.

We published the second Queer Creative Health Zine, bringing together learning from our growing programme and making community-led Creative Health research accessible beyond QUEERCIRCLE. The zine is freely available online, more than 300 free physical copies were distributed and the publication subsequently entered the Wellcome Collection archive.

Sarah Pletts and Rasha Hammami created a collectively held space for LGBTQ+ people to encounter grief through conversation, creative practice and ritual.

We piloted the Queer Community College, creating opportunities for LGBTQ+ people to exchange political knowledge, lived experience and practical skills through peer-led learning. The pilot tested political education alongside arts and health as another function of queer cultural infrastructure.

We published our Ethical Fundraising Policy, establishing principles for where our funding comes. It brought questions of values, power and accountability into the financial infrastructure of the organisation, recognising that how cultural work was resourced was part of the work itself.

Our work was cited in both the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing and Mayor of London’s Creative Health strategies, marking the first time LGBTQ+ communities were specifically recognised within these wider Creative Health frameworks. It demonstrated how learning developed through our programmes and publications was beginning to contribute to wider conversations about health, culture and public policy.

We supported the development and publication of MAD Zine, continuing to experiment with independent publishing as a way for lived experience, cultural practice and community knowledge to circulate beyond the organisation.

Museum of Transology took over the gallery for three months to develop volunteers' skills in archiving, digitisation, photography, facilitation and curating; Teresa Margolles used our library as a working studio for the development of Mil Veces un Instante; and Then & There gave performers free space for rehearsal and experimentation. Instead of treating space primarily as something to programme, we began experimenting with redistributing one of the organisation's most valuable resources: the building itself.

We secured multi-year Propel funding to experiment with systems change, giving us time and resources to explore how our work could move beyond individual programmes towards addressing the structures and conditions shaping LGBTQ+ lives. The investment created space for longer-term organisational experimentation that ultimately informed our approach to Queering the Institution.

QUEERCIRCLE joined the Palestine Solidarity Strike Day, using our cultural platform to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and connect our organisational practice to wider movements for justice. It marked an important step in developing the solidarity practice that subsequently informed Gathering with Palestine and Let’s Create Change.

We secured our first multi-year grant from The National Lottery Community Fund, enabling Creative Health to expand across workshops, research, young people’s activity and free community space. Longer-term funding allowed us to move from individual interventions towards sustained relationships with practitioners and communities.

More than 100 independently produced queer zines from around the world filled the gallery, bringing together different approaches to publishing, politics, identity, bodies and everyday life. Building on our Queer Creative Health zines, A to Zine established self-publishing and zine-making as a recurring QUEERCIRCLE methodology: a way for community knowledge to be produced, held and circulated outside conventional institutional forms.

Bones Tan Jones’ Tunnel Visions connected local and rural environmental struggles, using queer artistic practice to explore relationships between ecology, infrastructure and collective action. The enquiry continued through a six-week project with students at Shooters Hill Sixth Form, who imagined alternative uses for the new Silvertown Tunnel—a major development likely to affect their health, but which many had previously been unaware of.

We published our first Queer Creative Health report and accompanying zine, bringing community experience, research and creative practice together to explore LGBTQ+ experiences of health and wellbeing. It established Creative Health as a core part of our work and community knowledge as something we could collectively produce, publish and share; translating knowledge into an accessible resource that people and practitioners could use in their own lives and work.

Six years after our first pilot, QUEERCIRCLE opened its first permanent public home in London’s Design District with Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s Let Me Hold You and The Queens’ Jubilee, an archive presentation of the Gay Liberation Front’s Street Theatre. Gallery, project and community spaces brought arts, health, learning and grassroots activity together under one roof for the first time.

QUEERCIRCLE registered as a charity and built the governance, funding, team and organisational infrastructure needed to move from a voluntary initiative towards a permanent public organisation. We secured and developed our first physical home, turning an idea tested through temporary and digital activity into a permanent public institution.

During the pandemic, we developed digital residencies and Artists in Conversation, inviting artists to each choose four other artists they wanted to speak with—an early experiment in distributed curation in which contributors extended the programme through their own relationships and interests. The first conversations were unfunded, with artists contributing because they wanted to participate; their response helped us demonstrate demand and secure funding to pay contributors for the next series.

QUEERCIRCLE brought Isaac Julien and Travis Alabanza into conversation around Looking for Langston, connecting different generations of Black queer cultural practice and experience. The event established intergenerational dialogue as an early part of our approach: using culture not only to encounter queer histories, but to create conversations between them and the lives, politics and practices of younger generations.

QUEERCIRCLE began with a completely unfunded weekend-long takeover of LimeWharf, made possible through artists, organisers and others contributing their time, work and resources. More than 500 people enjoyed exhibitions, performances, screenings, walking tours and conversations, demonstrating both the desire for queer cultural space and what could be made possible through collective effort..