With and against historical trajectories on transformative art, resistance and social transformations we ask: How can art transform lives? And how can art empower us as embodied beings? This queer/feminist and trans-cultural student-led event presents an integrated performative and experimental workshop series on bodies, corpor(e)ality and empowerment. It takes place during international women’s history month, celebrated at Central European University (CEU) and will close a month full of feminist, critical, and subversive activities. The workshop series we offer aims to co-create a safe, intimate and queer and feminist space for diverse sensations through art and craft possibilities for practicing and celebrating forms of non-normative embodied experiences and collective empowering ways of relating. It focuses on the queer and feminist role of art to empower us in the necessary encounter of our own diverse embodied presence and corporality and through the re/appropriation of public space such as the University as intimate public space.
The workshop series consists of two workshop phases. Each workshop phase integrates two or three workshops (45-60 min). It aims to bring together people from different cultures to get together and experience their bodies individually and in a group through dance (Brazilian funky, twerk, vogue and queer salsa), meditation, music (live harp music), drag Eye-Makeup sessions, performance art and poetry. Each workshop phase ends with a critical and reflexive open discussion on the impressions, experiences and sensations of encountering one’s own presence in a re/appropriated intimate public space.
The workshops combine and interconnect different art styles with the desire to transform hegemonic realities with queer and feminist insights and through the power of one’s own presence in non-heteronormative and diverse corporality.
This event is organised by Sophie Rähme and Mery Palacios Mena, who co-founded art_trans_formation (a queer feminist, anti-colonial and transnational collective of and for artists, activists and researchers interested in building anti-racist, feminist and queer community spaces focusing on art and intersectional transformative justice in different regions connecting groups, artists, researchers and activists between Global Souths, Wests, Easts and Norths in anti-colonial care and transnational queer and feminist solidarity).
Workshop Phase I
Workshop 1 (12-2pm) - Empoder-arte (female dancehall) with Wiwa - at Auditorium -
Link: https://tinyurl.com/37w5ah9r
Workshop 2 (12-2pm) - Dance Workshop Vogue with Ina Holub - at Glass-Hall/Auditorium -
Link: https://tinyurl.com/3rwrx87b
Workshop Phase II
Open Poetry Reading with Mihret Kebede & Oishi
(5-6pm) - at the Auditorium
Workshop 3 (3-5pm) - A different I Make-Up WKS with Kushboo at Room QS B 511-
Link: https://tinyurl.com/2wr8rkp6
Workshop 4 (3-5pm) - Healing and Transformation through Music and Arts - (Sensory Activation Exercise and Inner Child Meditation and Musical Story Telling) with Agnes Verano & Anna Zhu - at Glass Hall/Auditorium
Link: https://tinyurl.com/399f7ebe
Workshop 5 (3-5pm) - Queer Salsa with Lucie Naude at Auditorium
Link: https://tinyurl.com/4hf8tffj
Open Queer Art Performances (5-7pm) - at Glass Hall/Auditorium
SLIMY ENTANGLEMENTS & TEXTUREAL THINKING - A PERFORMATIVE PRESENTATION with Nerea González
(6-7pm) - at the Glass Hall
Queer Feminist End of Term Party at the Auditorium (7-10pm)