Queercircle

Over the past three years, we’ve brought together artists, health practitioners, young people, organisers, academics, researchers, grassroots groups and partners across sectors to understand our role within society. What has emerged is not a fixed institution but a growing, shape-shifting ecosystem—one that changes as new people enter, new relationships form and new priorities surface. By using the arts as our primary means of engagement we’re reimagining the role of the “institution” by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and lean into the messiness of the unknown. This openness to experimentation has enabled us to remain flexible, adaptive, and responsive within an increasingly hostile social and political environment.

As an organisation-in-process, 2026 marks a pivotal moment in QUEERCIRCLE’s development. Over the next 12 months, we will co-develop our future strategy with this wider ecology, shaping a new framework to better articulate our work built around four interconnected pillars. Each pillar is structured around three elements: the guiding question that frames our inquiry, the practices already in motion, and the areas we will collectively explore and test over the year ahead. By the end of this process, we aim to have developed a community-led strategy that supports the ethical and sustainable infrastructure needed to continue and deepen this experimental work.
HOW WE WILL EXPLORE IN PRACTICE
Over the next 12 months, QUEERCIRCLE will explore its strategic questions through governance experiments, community-led structures, and a year-long programme of activity. Practice itself is used as a method of inquiry, testing how Collective Governance, Cultural Democracy, Community Knowledge, and Solidarity Economies function in real time.
- We are introducing a paid Advisory Group. This group is an experiment in alternative governance, responding to the exclusionary nature of traditional voluntary trustee models. Those invited bring diverse lived and professional experience to interrogate our strategic pillars, test assumptions and support the co-development of our evolving strategy.
- Informal Community Knowledge, Data, and Policy Steering Groups will convene at key points throughout the year. These groups create spaces for focused discussion, shared reflection, and sense-making, helping translate learning from practice into organisational development and policy-relevant insights.
- Following an open call in 2025, 20 LGBTQIA+ led groups across arts, creative health and social action now use QUEERCIRCLE’s space free of charge each month. Together, they form the Catalyst Collective: a shared ecology rather than a fixed programme, supporting connection, mutual learning and resource-sharing across organisations.
Programme of Inquiry
The programme for 2026 is structured across four seasons. Each season operates as a site of experimentation, exploring specific questions across the four pillars.
WHERE WE MEET

Season 1

Artist Rachel Sale will undertake a three-month residency across the QUEERCIRCLE ecology, exploring: how communities define QUEERCIRCLE’s identity, needs, skills, and ambitions across the ecosystem, existing and potential forms of mutual aid, how alliances can be strengthened in response to rising fascism.

Find out more
A QUEER ATLAS — COUNTER-MAPPING CREATIVE HEALTH

Season 2

extends the inquiry to the city through counter-mapping practices exploring queer health, creativity and place. Research commissioned by QUEERCIRCLE and led by River Ujhadbor examines how mapping reveals both the forces shaping queer wellbeing and the practices that resist them.

Outputs from this season will form the Queer Atlas of London — a living collection of community-made maps, tools, and processes.
REHEARSING DEMOCRACY

Season 3

approaches somatics as a tool for practising democratic processes, focusing on how people make decisions, negotiate differences, and participate in collective action.

Six artists will be invited to use the space freely, developing participatory work and contributing to the co-development of future programme directions alongside participants from earlier seasons.
QUEER COMMUNITY LIBRARY

Season 4

focuses on consolidation and shared learning. QUEERCIRCLE will be reconfigured as a Queer Community Library. The library will function as both a physical space and a knowledge practice holding research, publications, tools, artworks and documentation produced throughout the programme.

Rather than acting as an archive or endpoint, the Queer Community Library is conceived as a living resource: supporting reflection, dialogue and future learning while making visible the forms of community knowledge generated throughout the year.