Queered Futures Lab
​2022 - 2025
Monthly, online writing workshops; in-person workshops; experimental performance-installations
About

Queered Futures Lab is an interdisciplinary community which gathering around a shared interest in critically queering pasts, present and futures through writing, performance, and conversation. We believe that storytelling is an essential muscle we need to train to envision more playful and regenerative futures!
 
We experiment with queered methodologies of storytelling, testing collaborative forms of performative writing techniques that activate the collective imagination, body, other senses and alternate logics in the writing process. Emerging in/from these practices are forms of feminist, decolonial, science fiction storytelling that reach for near and far possibilities of queerness, technology, bodies, gender, ecology and community.

Together we collectively explore practices of queering narratives in near and far.
What are we interested in?

Queerness
We gather around the notion of queerness as a mode of resisting futures built for us around compulsive and unquestioned heteronormativity. Our queerness also resists colonial, capitalist  Our lived experiences of marginalisation but also of queer joy and community forms the backbone of our sharing during the sessions and becomes the kindling from which we build our past, present and future narratives. Embedded into our discussions is also a critical reflecting on queerness and what it means to future from a queer perspective. 

Futurism
We are particularly committed to discussing the idea of ‘futurity’ critically. How do we imagine the future without neglecting the urgency of the present? How do we relate to the past in our futuring? Can we adopt a practise of speculative presentism? We have before described our approach as ‘backwards facing futurism’. For us, this is a methodology of orienting ourselves towards desirable futures while still facing the tensions of the past, incorporating memories and ancestry into our storytelling in order to destabilise the compulsive future orientation of the progress narratives that dominate science fiction. We juggle with the axioms of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’, unraveling linear timelines while assembling queer ones and become excited about thinking of temporality at a multitude of scales and directions.

Temporality
We also want to take time for slowing down and existing out of time. What happens when we go so deep into our practices, become so focused in the moment we are in, that we create different experiences to/within time? Can presentness also be a form of futuring in which we actively write our imminent potential?

Entanglement
We are interested in experimental writing practises that negotiate an expanded notion of authorship. How can writing be something that emergences through an interaction with an ‘other’? Writing not as a ‘thing’ but as an event, as a collection of relationships and occurrences. We look for ways of writing through entanglements with the other.

Liminality
Our practise not only traverses thresholds, but is also contained within them. Queer Futures is nestled in the vast space between here and there, you and me, now and then and the writing we are interested in also seeks out this muddy liminality, looking for contested boundaries and dysfunctional membranes. Our futures are built in grey spaces on continually rearranging grounds. Each of our sessions explore a new juxtaposition as it’s theme. You can find all the session themes for 2023 here.

Anarchic Digitality
We explore the cracks between the physical and digital, testing analog methods of inhabiting space virtually. We see the internet as an anarchic liminal space that permits us to traverse permeable borders, boundaries and binaries in ways that are not usually permitted in non-virtual space.
In-Person Workshops and Events
Cosy-Radical Storytelling; Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop, 22 October 2024, 19:00-22:00 CET, De Opstand, Den Haag
Hybrid Futures: Entangled Doorways Performance Event, 20 October 2024, 19:00-22:00 CET, Berlin
Hybrid Futures: Song Writing  / Performance Workshop, 24 April 2024, 16:00-21:00 CET, Bar Bario, Amsterdam
Hybrid Futures: Script Writing / Storytelling Workshop, 19 April 2024, 14:00-19:00 CET, Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin
Queer Futures Presents…Spooky Writing at a Distance, 27 July 2023, 14:00-17:00 CET, Underlab Berlin, Willmanndamm Berlin
Queered Economies; Enacting Networks of Reciprocity, 7 June 2023, 14:15-15:45 CET, re:publica (conference), Kreuzberg, Berlin
Drag at the End of the World, 6 June 2023, 15:00-21:00 CET, Wedding, Berlin
Side-by-Side: Speculative Histories, Dani, 20 October 2022, 18:00-21:00 CET, Wedding, Berlin
Otherscapes - Evening of Live Media Performances, 18 October 2022, 19:00 CET, AL.Berlin

Online Workshops
Queer Futuring in Practice (Zine-making), Dani and Miche, 13 February 2024, 19:30-21:30 CET
Questioning Queerness, Dani and Miche, 10 January 2024, 20:00 CET
High/Low, Dani and Lilu, 26 November 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Natural/Artificial, Kit, 29 October 2023, 17:30-18:30 CET
Quantum Forum, Dani and Miche, 8 October 2023, 14:00-18:00 CET
Individual/Collective, Dani and Miche, 24 September 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Transparent/Opaque, Dani and Miche, 23 July 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Me/You, Miche, 25 June 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Chaos/Order, Luke, 28 May 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Virtual/Physical , Dani, 30 April 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Telematic Writing Event (augmented reality event), Dani and Miche, 28 April 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Motion/Stillness, Dani and Lilu, 26 March 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Here/There, Miche and Sasha, 26 February 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
Future/Past, Dani and Miche, 29 January 2023, 17:00-19:00 CET
From the Archive: Sound Transmissions, Dani and Miche, 27 November 2022, 16:00-18:00 CET
Spooky Writing from a Distance, Dani and Miche, 30 October 2022, 16:00-18:00 CET
Interactive Imagining, Miche, 25 September 2022, 16:00-18:00 CET
A Long-Form Conversation with the Danube River, Dani, 28 August 2022, 16:00-18:00 CET
On Time, Alex and Miche, 24 July 2022, 16:00-18:00 CET
Fabricating Vocabularies, Emma Irwin, 26 June 2022, 16:00-18:00 CET
New Worlds Through Juxtaposition / A Fragment is the Whole, Dani and Miche, 29 May 2022, 16:00-18:00 CET
World-Building Through Senses, Miche, 24 April 2022, 16:00-18:00 CET
What if, Miche O'higgins, 27 March 2022, 14:00-16:00 CET