• Desire Lines:
    Counter mapping queer creative health

    April 11 - June 14
    The maps we use every day help us navigate streets, but they rarely help us navigate belonging, grief, desire, or...
    The maps we use every day help us navigate streets, but they rarely help us navigate belonging, grief, desire, or survival - River Újhadbor

    This spring season we further explore 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.


    Researcher and theatre practitioner River Újhadbor has co-developed a framework for radical mapping praxis, gathering examples, methods, and provocations from different movements, geographies, and struggles to inform our approach.

  • We understand this praxis as an ongoing cycle of collective action and reflection: a way of mapping that foregrounds relation,...
    Click to download the full report
    We understand this praxis as an ongoing cycle of collective action and reflection: a way of mapping that foregrounds relation, partiality, and transparency. Through collective, experimental processes, we seek to strengthen queer wellbeing by tracing and transforming the forces that make us sick, exhausted, and excluded, while cultivating networks of care, joy, and autonomy - River Újhadbor

    River’s research takes the form of a 35 page report, Fragments of a Queer Radical Mapping Praxis (free to download and pick-up). It includes examples of queer counter mapping from around the globe, composite lyrical poems, analysis of key concepts, as well as the final framework of ‘seven fragments to orient us’. A richly illustrated map which will stretch around QUEERCIRCLE’s walls, laying bare our collaborative process.

  • Our space is also filled with ‘desire lines’ created by artist Jacob V. Joyce - images of outdoor cruising zones in the UK as well as those taken from Trinidad and Jamaica (where British colonial laws render queer intimacy a fugitive activity). Desire lines are pathways that bypass official, longer or less logical routes, forms of everyday civil disobedience that rely on us following our feelings and intuition. 

     

    River’s framework arrives as QUEERCIRCLE looks to co-create a 10 year strategy with our partners and public. You are invited to contribute to our ongoing mapping process with your own personal reflections and desires. 

     

    Workshops throughout the season invite you to sound landscapes; explore the poetics of healing; share experiences of cruising; map your way out of masculinity and un-learn trans medical histories. An Opening Day invites us to share and (counter) map what queer creative health means to us.