This work is a performance-to-video piece enacting in eight scenes the collaboratively written creation myth of Q-LoXXX. It depicts a volcanic island where all earthly species—extinct, endangered, and present—exist in a state of continuous mutation and becoming. This transformative place is threatened by static and contaminated external forces, prompting its inhabitants to enact a cannibal sacrifice to restore the land’s cyclical and ever-changing nature.
The project connects Latin American decolonial and cannibalistic discourses with queer resistance experiences and theory, breaking through static subjectivities and fixed identities. We channel the lives, efforts, and achievements of those before us, carrying our queer ghosts with us into a utopia of our own collective imagination and creation: Q-LoXXX. Through this process of speculation and fictionalization, we reclaim figures, spaces, memories and beings, to highlight them as ideals and values of our shared experience.
This project was developed through a collaborative process with queer Latinx asylum seekers and migrants from the extended community of Papaya Kuir. I co-facilitated a series of writing and performance workshops that employed character building, role play, fabulation, and collage to collectively create the myth. I then synthesized this work, transforming the raw material into a structured script of eight scenes. To materialize the universe of Q-LoXXX, I crafted props from papier-mâché and found objects and painted the scenography, giving form to our transformative space for the community, of which I am part of, to experientially live its utopia and document its own methods of world-making.
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This work consists of a series of workshops that re-signify the figure of the cannibal, reclaiming it as a transformative concept symbolizing mutual contamination, interconnectedness and radical solidarity.
The project engages with Latin American decolonial and cannibalistic discourses, which challenge notions of purity and propose multiplicity and mutation. By inquiring into the politics of nomadic queer and trans experiences within the Latin American diaspora in Europe, we aim to reclaim cannibalism from its colonial associations with savagery. Instead, we reinterpret it as a metaphor for absorbing otherness to stimulate new creation and foster community.
Together with Papaya Kuir, we formed a group of 12 queer Latinx migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees through an open call. The co-creation workshops were structured around three methodological axes: 1) theoretical-corporeal reflection (discussions on anthropophagy and Amazonian epistemologies, multi-species meditations, collective writing of manifestos); 2) cartography and material creation (body counter-maps, painting of mutant portraits, utopian collages, prop fabrication); and 3) performative embodiment and story-telling (cannibal role-playing games, creation of stories and myths, dance and performance to video).
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Arrangement of sculptural props, costumes, and other ephemera used by the activist collective Papaya Kuir (PK) in a series of performance workshops held in West, Contemporary Art Center. These objects were part of the scenography created for the enactment of a collaboratively written myth.
The workshops were developed through an open call organized with Papaya Kuir, which brought together a fixed group of 12 queer and trans immigrants and asylum seekers. Over a number of 10 co-creation workshops, we produced multiple outcomes, including this myth.
The myth narrates the cosmopolitics and story of Q-loXXX, a place where all earthly species—extinct, endangered, and present—exist in a state of continuous mutation. This transformative place is threatened by static and contaminated external forces. In response, the inhabitants of Q-loXXX enact a cannibal sacrifice to restore the land’s cyclical and ever-changing nature.
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The project proposes the cannibal as a conceptual figure and transformative device, embodying the politics of nomadic subjectivities within Latin American queer activism. It explores how this figure can channel multiplicity, embrace alterity, and drive social change while challenging dominant narratives.
The lexicon functions as a foundation for structuring the research phase, including workshops and participant encounters. It forms a collection of interconnected ideas, with the potential to evolve into a publication that deepens these explorations and extends the discourse.
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The project is the first outcome of a storytelling and sculpture collaboration with Clem Edwards. Using trash collected from the exhibition space, we created a landscape that acts as a character inspired by horror films like The Blob. It embodies discarded and unwanted objects “taking revenge” by growing, absorbing, and transforming.
This work deals with themes of the abject and the interplay between the ethereal and the material. By reclaiming trash and embeding it within a fictional narrative, we examine ideas of value, decay, and transformation, reflecting on both material agency and material excess. We use humour and fiction to address urgent societal questions while proposing joyful and imaginative futurities.
Commissioned to create this piece at Brutus, we transformed the exhibition space into a shared studio. We employed a collaborative “Ping-Pong” process, exchanging ideas and experimenting with materials like polymer clay, paint, LED lights, and smoke. Built with pizza cartons, pigeon nests, appliance scraps, and street trash, the work integrates sculptural techniques and shared interests in horror, ghostly figures, and exaggeration.
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Borrowing from music concerts, five live performers activate simultaneously with their bodies and voices, in harmony and rhythm, the sculpture-based music band Mud and Sticky Band (see following work), while following a score. The work explores the materiality and agency of the sculptures while interacting with other materials such as trash, lubricant, mud, fire, and organic remains.
The performance examines the relationship between objects, bodies, and spaces, mediated by desire and intuition. It reflects on the agency of materials and textures observed during site visits across the Netherlands, weaving them into a narrative that connects landscapes, sound, and movement.
Performers harmonize with the sculptures and the accompanying sound piece Mud and Sticky Band: Side A, which draws on embodied research and site-specific reflections. Props and actions echo the textures and shapes of visited landscapes, blending choreography, material interaction, and sound dialogues.
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The project began with embodied research conducted in natural and urban locations across the Netherlands. Guided by Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, I used this text as a manual to navigate these environments, exploring the interplay between bodies, spaces, non-human entities, and materials. The research involved intuitive object collection and reorganization, soundscape recordings, movement notations, and choreographies inspired by objects and spaces. These were complemented by detailed sound descriptions, conversations with friends, and workshops with students.
This work has been guided by an interest in finding new ways of relating to matter, ‘nature’ and the environment. By allowing my desire and subjectivity to be shaped and transformed through these interactions, the project creates a dialogue between sound, texture, movement, and form, reflecting an evolving relationship with the material world.
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The project responds to the urgency of rethinking our consumption habits and questions how shifts in our relationship with objects and surroundings will influence musicality, sensuality, and pop culture. It investigates whether new forms of music-making and band-creating can emerge from these transformations and from what’s immediately reachable and at-hand.
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Contesting Madness is an installation consisting of four filmic chapters: The Animal, The Water, The Jungle, and The Nightmare. The work features a sculptural structure resembling human body parts, alongside video works, paintings, and objects. Inside the structure, a universe unfolds with video screens, props, mannequins, sleeping bags turned into snakes, fences with dripping liquids, and other transformed everyday objects. Performative responses to texts are staged with various participants, layering sound, symbols, and hybrid characters extracted from conversations around pereived notions of madness and magic. The installation itself blends sculptural and filmic elements, transforming everyday objects to challenge perceptions of identity, sanity, and knowledge.
The work and films examine the impact of coloniality and diasporic movement on perceptions of sanity, challenging modernity’s dichotomies between human and nature, body and mind, and reason and intuition. It critiques the systemic violence of institutional bio-politics inflicted on ethnic minorities, impoverished communities, women, and sexual dissidents. Additionally, it investigates the body’s capacity to communicate beyond language and exist beyond legibility, even as it navigates society’s demand to transparency and graspability.
The project is based on conversations with various guests based in Rotterdam, amongst them: RAM Supermarket operator (anonymous), Merel Hooijer, Virgil Zaalman, Floortje Meijer, Esdra Baris, Winti healer (anonymous), Lianne Rueb and Vanita and Johanna Monk.
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Triple Pocket Napkin Fold is a glimpse into diverse sound-making practices, featuring new compositions by twelve contemporary artists, poets, musicians and theatre makers.
For this project GHOST commissioned artists whose practices engage with concepts or methodologies of opacity and improvisation, key themes in the work of Edouard Glissant, who wrote of these as forms of resistance to dominant culture(s).
A pocket hides what is inside until it can be performatively revealed. From the opacities of poetry and withheld language emerges this collection of folded, layered, improvised, imperfect and unexpected forms of address: mud dancing, whispers, shouts, laughter, screams and vocal sound making that resist the order of speech.
With contributions from Ogutu Muraya, The Postpeople, Cannach MacBride, Angela Schilling, Dean Bowen, Karin Iturralde Nurnberg, Isabel Marcos, Milena Bonilla, La Leche Travesti, Aloardi, Megan Cope and Isha Ram Das and Dani Reynolds.
The project emerged from a study group on Glissant’s The Poetics of Relation (1990), facilitated in 2019 by GHOST and Tender Center, a queer community space in Rotterdam.
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