In Spring 2026, QUEERCIRCLE further explored the idea of queer creative health through experiments in radical mapping praxis, collective mapping practices that built on counter- and anti-mapping traditions to challenge the social structures that drive health inequities for queer communities.

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

This praxis was understood as an ongoing cycle of collective action and reflection: a way of mapping that foregrounded relation, partiality, and transparency. Through collective, experimental processes, the programme sought to strengthen queer wellbeing by tracing and transforming the forces that make queer communities sick, exhausted, and excluded, while cultivating networks of care, joy, and autonomy.

River's framework arrived as QUEERCIRCLE looked to co-create a 10 year strategy with its partners and publics. Visitors were invited to contribute to this mapping process with their own personal reflections and desires in the space and at workshops.

Also shown in the space was artist Jacob V. Joyce's 'Desire Lines' series, photographs of cruising grounds across Antigua, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK and other parts of Europe, sites where queer people have sought forbidden connection with each other, with the land, and with suppressed histories and spiritual traditions.

One image in the series began as a photograph taken on a plantation in Antigua and Barbuda, a site Joyce connects to the story of Prince Klaas and his co-conspirators Hercules and Tomboy, who plotted a 1736 uprising against the island's enslavers. For Joyce, the plantation was itself a place of constant cruising, of people risking severe punishment to secretly share culture, education and the possibility of another future.

The eight works in the show, each three metres tall, began as photographs before being reworked into riso print, scanned with fluid motions though a scanning wand then heat press printed onto crep fabric. Printed in a single shade of green, the slow, one-colour-at-a-time riso process was a deliberate choice, shifting attention from what the works depict to the act of making itself.

Situated within a countermapping tradition, the works reimagined the cruising ground not as a space to be surveilled but as a space historically defined by evading detection. Joyce's practice consistently invited people to follow their desires and step off the paths they'd been told to keep to.