PS: is very happy to present
Snapshots on Queer Family-Making
Thursday June 25th
The doors will open at 20.00 and the performance will begin at 21.30 sharp as it will be live-streamed on TQAF's Facebook page.
Bar will be open from 20:00 till late with strawberry cocktails
In the context of Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival 2020 –“What is Fear?”
Snapshots on Queer Family-Making is a performance featuring Theo’s ongoing photographic practice with the queer community around them. As a continuous practice that celebrates queer people in affectionate images, 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 the process of creating an imaginary community as be-coming home and alive, and queering trauma, through some of the primary connection “technologies” – during the recent lockdown, and especially for queers sometimes the only ones available – memory and imagination.
While Theo shares some of the images of people, who, as a community, in a way enabled their survival and becoming, and a poetic and movement meditation on this journey, we gather to honour and celebrate kinship and company, and, through them, perhaps, to paraphrase Jonas Mekas, the brief glimpses of paradise we carry in and with ourselves, even when there is at times nowhere to go.
This event is co-hosted by Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival (TQAF) and is part of the TQAF 2020 festival programme. Other public events will take place in Madrid and Berlin in June and July. For more information on the events hosted by TQAF, please visit
https://queerartsfestival.gr/festival-programme/ The performance will also be live streamed at 21.30 on TQAF's Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/thessqaf/---
Artist's bio
Theo Ilichenko is a visual artist from Russia, currently living in Berlin. In their hybrid video and performance practice and essayistic documentary forms they explore film, photo portraiture, and storytelling as an affective medium of care, engaged witnessing and cultural memory, and art as a grassroots survival and solidarity technology.
Theo’s work is motivated by the experiences of loss and gendered violence; politics and ethics of visual representation; self-organised communities and forms of togetherness; and grotesque, the erotic and celebration as a form of resistance.
A large part of their artistic work and personal commitment as an aspiring “funeral stripper”* in apprenticeship (a grief care worker for queer communities) is dedicated to mourning practices in the queer communities and to mutually learning and sharing unique ways of transforming social violence.
* Title metaphorically refers to the existing practice in some parts of Asia
