Workshops
2025
“Queer critique attempts to understand communal grief, group
psychology, and the
need for a politics that ‘carries’ our dead with us in battles for the present
and the future.”
---José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
---José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
Foundations of the Project:
In 2024, I participated in the Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) at the Institute for Postnatural Studies in Madrid, where I deepened my artistic and theoretical research on the intersection between queer thought and ecological thinking. In this program, I found a space to connect queer experiences with other ways of world-making—envisioning alternative paradigms of thought that erase the binary divisions between culture/nature, human/animal, body/territory, self/other—while exploring art's capacity to generate new myths, terrestrial imaginaries, and forms of critical knowledge. This period catalyzed the development of Cannibal Becomings as a broad, long-term, and participatory research project that seeks to collaborate with queer collectives from the Latin American diaspora to study and re-signify the figure of the cannibal (a colonial marker of savagery) through lived queer experience.
Building upon this research, I initiated a series of co-creation workshops with Papaya Kuir, an activist organization working with queer Latinx migrant communities in the Netherlands, where I serve on the board of directors. Our process consists of collective gatherings where we delve into discursive and material exercises, connecting it with our own experiences and those of our predecessors. In doing so, we practice interconnection and inter-contamination, examining how our subjectivities are transformed by other bodies, spirits, and imaginaries, allowing forces, energies, practices, and ideas to move among us.
What is Papaya Kuir?:
Papaya Kuir is a lesbian-transfeminist collective created by and for Latin American migrants and refugees residing in the Netherlands. They participate in discussion panels, events, and anti-racist and anti-patriarchal demonstrations, denouncing the issues that affect LGBTIQ+ communities. They coordinate emergency support systems through their own network for people undergoing processes of transition—migratory, gender, or sexual—and foster community building by organizing cultural and artistic events, such as queer cabarets, workshops, and parties, with the goal of cultivating a sense of belonging and facilitating processes of social transformation within their community.
Artistic Research Methods Employed
Together with Papaya Kuir, we formed a group of 12 queer Latinx migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees through an open call. We developed a series of workshops together that consisted of: 1) theoretical discussions and collective readings on anthropophagic discourses linked to Amazonian epistemologies and ontologies; 2) immersive meditations where we visualized multi-species becomings; 3) role-playing games exploring our queer cannibal tendencies; 4) counter-maps of our bodies as territories, borrowing ideas from Latin American ecofeminism; 5) painting bodily portraits as mutant beings in connection with objects and spaces representative of our sexual identity; 6) collective writing of manifestos about our ideas of community; 7) collaborative creation of stories and myths; 8) elaboration of collective collages to imagine queer utopias; 9) rebellious embodiment through dance and performance; 9) creation of performance props using papier-mâché and accessible materials; and, 10) staging and performance for video.
https://www.papayakuir.com/
This work has been developed in:
Jacuzzi, Amsterdam, 2024.
West, Contemporary Art Center, Den Haag (2025)
Credits:
This work was made with the support of the Fonds Voor Cultuurparticipatie (2024-2025).
Production stills - documentation by:
Studio Wolphi
Chris Tym