Why Queer? Why In/Visible? Why Academy?

Why Queer?

We are not interested in putting the forms of the world in their place, but displacing them.

We neither believe in ultimate explanations and solutions for the burning questions of existence, order and disorder.

We want to explore our everyday and wider structural oppressions not as one dimensional bodies but as living creatures enmeshed in complex webs of power relations.

We question sexualities and genders as we know them.

Why In/Visible?

We raised our fists in the air too often to demand visibility without thinking of what this would mean in a culture where visibility is associated with controllability.

We don’t need visibility if it means we have to embrace policed sexualities and genders.

The way of putting our bodies in the world is expected to be either masculine or feminine, so that assumptions can be made about what kind of body parts do we have under our pants, and how do we use them.

In mainstream culture we are either visible as men by taking up as much space as possible, or as women by being pretty and by attracting others' gaze to our bodies.

We queer visibility and challenge expectations of body outlooks and modes of being in the world which aim to place all the bodies in binary categories.

Why Academy?

Plato’s Academy was the major birth place of the western civilization obsessed with purity, perfection and order based on the separation of stable and fixed categories from each other. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, copy and original, natural and artificial are just a few of these category pairs, which make sense only if one element of the binary opposition is considered to be inferior to the other. In our academy we don’t celebrate Pallas Athena as the goddess of knowledge laid on pure concepts, but as the queer persona of an androgynous creature popped out of the head of the boss.

With our academy we are creating a life affirming space not for the disciplined and right bodies but for all the defiant, queer and ethical beings.

The desire for purity and perfection is the hotbed of all the fascisms in the world. We embrace imperfection, variation, fluidity and impurity.