goEast_2024_Katalog

The screenings take us to different queer imaginaries:
opulent campy fantasies of a marginalised heroine as
in the 1979 Slovenian film KILL ME GENTLY / UBIJ ME
NEŽNO; or away from the current images of war towards
landscapes of potentiality – where you do not see
unambiguously defined people (in fact, sometimes there
are no humans at all!), as in the “Renegade Joy Till the End
of the World” program featuring subversive short films
from Ukraine.
As one of the filmmakers featured in “Renegade Joy”
quipped, a straightforward approach to “queer” just ends
up making it straight. This selection will ask that you
stretch your imagination of queerness and invite you to
rebel through (improbable) joy and playfulness, to reflect
on the limits of happiness – and humanness – and to
empathise with what is left when the joy is washed away
by inconceivable grief.
One of the core queer ways to rebel against the stagnation
of “heterodoom” and to affirm life has always been our
desire: as Queer Nation Manifestos claims, “Every time
we fuck, we win.” (Queers Read This, 1990). Following this
principle, we happily offered our guests Masha Ravlyk
and Ton Melnyk the opportunity to curate a program of
queer feminist porn specially for the Symposium. The
resulting program, “Naked Bodies, Bared Souls“, includes
six short films from Ukraine, Poland and Romania. “They
vary in content and form: works with a decent budget
and amateur DIY porn, films with a plot and video clips,
created by artists and by activists”, in the words of the
curators.
***
Queer desire, queer intimacy (including the platonic
version), are at the source of (often deadly) processes of
othering, and – at the same time – the final, ultimate way
to insist on living even in the darkest times. As long as
there is even one place on earth where queer intimacy is
not safe, for whatever reason, it fuels our aspiration for
utopia. As one of the Symposium guests, Syaivo, wrote in
the manifesto for ZBOKU, a queer grassroots collective
from Ukraine: “...‘zbochuvannya’ (perversion) has been
and is called something that is not easily understood or
‘corrected’. although it does not need to be corrected, and
understanding is not really that important. it is knowledge
by touch, knowledge by feeling. we create, change and
spread this knowledge when we touch – with our bodies,
words, lives. we touch without a single goal or direction –
(without hope) hoping for another world.” (Syaivo)
In this process of touching and mutual exchange, our
convoluted mangrove-like roots intertwine and feed
each other to resiliently survive even in the harshest
environments, allowing us to grow into something
magnificently queer.
Jasmina Šepetavc, Yulia Serdyukova
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