To commemorate the year that was, we invited an array of artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and performers to share a list of the most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects they encountered in 2019.
Girls Like Us is an independent magazine turning the spotlight on an international expanding community of lesbians and queers within arts, culture, and activism. Through personal stories, essays and vanguard visuals, Girls Like Us unfolds feminist legacies in arts, design and writing. Mixing politics with pleasure, the magazine maps collaborative routes toward a non-patriarchal future.
QUEERS READ THIS!
This is a non-hierarchical list of 10 projects, moments, initiatives, or places that rocked our worlds in 2019. Each item has been authored by one of the Girls Like Us team, Jessica Gysel, Sara Kaaman, Katja Mater, or Marnie Slater, with authorship indicated with initials at the end of the texts.
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CATEGORY IS BOOKS
Category Is Books is an independent queer bookshop in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, that I visited when I was on an artist residency at the CCA with Buenos Tiempos, International, another queer project I am involved with. Run by wife and wife team, Charlotte (they/she) and Fionn Duffy-Scott (she/they), Category Is Books occupies a ground floor corner shop space with large windows that open to the street. Alongside stocking a large and eclectic range of secondhand and new LGBTQIA+ books, the bookshop also hosts a queer barbershop, open mic evenings, and support groups, among many other events, and autism friendly Wednesdays when sound stimulation is kept to a minimum. You can check out their online calendar, which also lists the nights off and breaks of the organizers—queers need vacations too. (MS)
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DOOF MAGAZINE
I already loved Leste Magazine, the bi-annual, risograph-printed queer journal of new erotica and their Instagram takeovers at @lestemagazine, based in Montreal, Canada. Many many powerful stories! But about five months ago they started their sister mag @doofmagazine. Now I am obsessed! DOOF also does weekly Instagram takeovers but all food focused—food diaries, recipes—and talks about more pressing social issues related to food, like food production, food accessibility, as well as eating disorders. Don’t think instagrammable restaurant plate pics. This takes appetite to a whole next level! Eating between busy work hours, where you got it, food accessibility through growing your own, trade, dumpster diving, food as comfort and energiser, and hangover soup. A huge array of kitchens, food heritage, and stories of family and friendship food dynamics, amazing food sculptures, etc., etc. DOOF magazine will also become a printed object (no deadline yet). I can’t wait! (KM)
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SAMOA HOUSE LIBRARY
After doing a talk at the Melbourne Art Book Fair, Katja, Marnie, and myself launched the “Economy” issue of Girls Like Us at the Samoa House Library in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. When the local arts school closed its library, the Samoa House Library established itself as a self-organized alternative fine arts library that also functions as a place of community development and communal learning. All books and magazines are gifted, and they are catalogued by the name of the person or institution that donated them—creating a new kind of subjective mapping within the library. Samoa House is such a friendly space, continually redesigned and re-authored—you can go there for group discussions, lectures, workshops, screenings, and to find hidden gems (like a first issue of a now-defunct press), courtesy of the horizontal and accessible structure based on sourcing directly from the collective’s network of galleries, collectors, artists, and independent publishers. (JG)
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LYRA PRAMUK’S SPINS AND SPELLS
A rainy November evening in Taborkirche church, Berlin, Germany. Singer, composer, and artist Lyra Pramuk is alternately standing, sitting, walking, and dancing around a small table next to the altar, by her laptop. She occasionally sips from a cup of herbal tea. Behind her, by way of a crucifix, is a projection showing notes on kindness in a TextEdit document. For two hours I am spellbound in an uninterrupted performance of intimacy, warmth, camp, and stand-up comedy. Lyra turns the sound up loud, the church and the audience’s bodies are permeated by her music, voice, rhythms, words. She shares her musical autobiography, playing us fragments of the Pokrovsky Ensemble, Cathy Berberian, Shobha Gurtu, and Steve Reich, while talking about social media, spirituality, repetition, choirs. There is nowhere but now, in this music, with this artist talk turned performance turned sermon. Later I read her saying, “Our souls are being harvested through the screens of our phones by a few powerful tech bros who probably couldn’t care less about us. We need each other more than we need them.” And we need moments like this, of listening together, of kindness, off-screen. (SK)
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QUEER BARBERSHOPS
I live in Brussels, where there is no out queer barbershop, so if I am traveling to a new place I Google like crazy to find out if the city I am in has one. There is no singular way to define a queer barbershop, but in Melbourne, Prague and Bristol my experiences have included gender-neutral and self-nominated scaled pricing, non-judgmental conversations about my hair care routines (or lack of), and loads of information sharing about the local LGBTQIA+ scene, among many other pleasurable moments. One of my most meaningful queer barbershop encounters this year involved being in a new city alone, booking an appointment online, and finding myself in the suburban living room of a very queer artist, talking for an hour while they baked cookies, then sitting on a stool in their tiny kitchen while they cut my hair and we talked about theory, mental health, queer history, and studio practice. I left without paying, with full trust that I would paypal my chosen amount later that day. (MS)
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TENDER CENTER
Rotterdam is so lucky! At the end of 2018 the wonderful Tender Center came into existence, and in 2019 they started opening their doors regularly for all you enbies*, gender questioning, gender non-conforming radicals to just come over and hang out. Tender Center is a collective of feminist queers who are building the beginnings of a community center for culture; or a venue for queer events; or a les university of life in Rotterdam; a relational infrastructure with parties, and events like: Beyond The Binary Hang-Outs, open mic events, queer poetry nights, queer and feminist manifesto reading sessions, Red Moon Dark Room; make-out parties for lesbian trans non-binary burpy slutty slinky!! A really cozy atmosphere, background music, modular self-built furniture to play games and/or do arts & crafts, pillows to hang and be bored on, etc. ‘Nuf said, just go. (KM)
*Noun. enby (plural, enbies) (slang, neologism): A person who is non-binary; that is, a person whose gender identity is not strictly male nor female.
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MYCKET
From time to time we make a guest-edited issue, by giving the editorial reins to voices from our broader Girls Like Us network. At the moment, we’re excited to collaborate with Mycket, a queer and feminist architecture collective based in Stockholm, Sweden, around their project The Club Scene. This project investigates the architecture of the (night)club through reenactments of historical queer and feminist clubs, complete with costumes, décor, guests, dance, and performers. Mycket was founded in 2012 by a group of architects, designers, and artists. Their practice is informed by the theatrical, the carnivalesque, and political activism. Putting a queer perspective to the front, they are as much interested in the process as the end product. Often their projects take multiple forms and iteration, and are built and shaped over time. A personal favorite is Struggleoke – The Karaoke Bar with Songs That Care, a research project, installation, and karaoke bar where you can come to sing, listen, remember, cry, dance, and share histories of local, national, global struggles for justice. The project collects and rebuilds the material traces from ongoing fights for justice that have affected and continue to shape our realities (civil rights, suffragette movements, indigenous struggles, class battles, the environmental movement, and many, many more). (JG)
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BORROWING POSITIONS: ROLE-PLAYING DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE
A book recommendation! A LARPing cook book! A speculative proposal! From Helsinki-based educational collective Trojan Horse, this book suggests live-action roleplaying as a tool to subvert normalized ways of working in graphic design and architecture. Trojan Horse has been experimenting with LARPing since 2017, and this book collects essays, reflections, exercises, interviews, and documentation from previous LARPs, such as an interplanetary design conference that gathered designers from all over the universe, taking place on a space ship between Helsinki and Tallinn. Ambitious in its scope, the book asks if it is possible to use play and performance to “approach issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.” Contributions include Ana Teo Ala-Ruona, a Helsinki-based performance artist and art educator with a text on embodied transitional fiction writing, and an interview with designer and theorist Yin Aiwen. Looking forward to more larp-ing graphic designers! (SK)
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TRANSEMBLE
On May 4, 2019, Transemble, a new collective of trans*, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and intersex people, organized the first TRANS MARCH BRUSSELS in Belgium themed “Nothing About Us Without Us!” The march put resistance and celebration of trans*, non-binary, gender non-conforming and intersex bodies and perspectives to the front – you can read the speeches from the event in English, Dutch and French here. As the organizing collective clearly explained, their explicit aim was to make sure the TRANS MARCH BRUSSELS countered the recent (Western) trend of corporate, straight, and mainstream political hijacking of pride celebrations, and to work to point out and resist the further marginalization and/or tokenizing of minorities within the LGBTQIA+ community. I have a feeling that there could be a second march in 2020, so stay tuned to Transemble’s social media. (MS)
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COMMUNITY FUTURES LAB
A few issues ago (Girls Like Us # 10), we featured American Black Quantum Futurist artists—writer and lawyer Rasheedah Phillips, and artist and community organizer Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother)—who co-founded the Community Futures Lab in 2016 in Philadelphia. The lab functions as a community gallery, resource, zine library (including a zine-making workshop and resource library), workshop space, recording booth, and time capsule recording oral histories/futures in North Philadelphia, where both Rasheedah and Camae are based. One of the main focuses of the project is to protect the local communities, who have lived in the area for generations against the recent gentrification of that part of town. Many people have been evicted from their houses, due to real estate speculation and new demographics entering the neighbourhood. The Community Futures Lab wants to document, preserve, and share the community’s memories and (oral) stories for future generations. It’s a community art project at its core, that explores the intersections of futurism, literature, visual remixing, sound, and activism as art. (JG)
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