FRArt Experimental and Collaborative Artistic Research on Queer Collective Approaches to Harm Reduction and the Act of Gathering

1. introduction

  • type: Article
  • ref: DOC.2021.153
  • Date begin: June 1 2021

This is an experimental and collaborative artistic research project on queer collective approaches to harm reduction and the act of gathering. It is initiated during the current covid 19 crisis, which is especially affecting queer artists and activists practicing collectively, and aims to foster dissident thinking against healthism, away from the normalizing technologies of law, police, and medicine. This research is structured around two horizontal and self-managed gatherings of queer artists and activists hosted in remote locations in Belgium and abroad. A group of participants based in Brussels and its vicinity, and in Mediterranean Europe will be formed through a collaborative process. The group will engage in testing both models of gathering after the outbreak of the covid 19 epidemic, and harm reduction practices as tools to oppose healthism by experimenting with them. Considering a historical controversy between individual and group approaches to harm reduction, the gatherings are devised to facilitate questioning the possibility of a collective approach to risk. Claiming a history of queer expertise in community care and dissident thinking since the outbreak of the aids epidemic in the 1980s, this research aims to ask if political discourses on risk can emerge from gatherings of queer artists and activists.