SNAPSHOTS ON QUEER FAMILY-MAKING

performance, installation

commissioned and co-produced by Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival (TQAF) - What is Fear? and PS: gallery.

Snapshots on Queer Family-Making is a performance and an installation based on my ongoing documentary photographic practice with the queer community around me.

Mainly created with projected images of friends, loved ones, and those met in brief yet significant encounters, the installation offers a performance setting and a gathering environment. 

As a continuous practice that celebrates queer people in affectionate images and stories, it is also a form of care and resistance to loss, an existential photographic diary and a personal exploration of how images can become an inner shelter and, put together, an imaginary home and an extended family and community across physical spaces and times.

The practice reflects my process of creating an imaginary community as be-coming home and alive, and queering trauma, through some of the primary connection technologies  (relevant not only in lockdowns but often the only ones available to queers and migrants) – memory and imagination.

While the exhibition environment features images of people who, as a community, enabled my own survival and becoming, in the performance I shared a poetic and movement meditation on this journey where I invited the audience to gather and celebrate kinship and company, and, through these, to paraphrase Jonas Mekas, perhaps to touch the brief glimpses of paradise we carry in and with ourselves, even when there is at times nowhere to go.