THE QUEER ARCHIVE FESTIVAL 2021

“Life Guarding” is based around water metaphors, both in the track’s lyrics and in its visuals. It is a film-collage by Tillmans, edited by Michael Amstad, that explores shifts its lens “between micro and macrocosms, collages of body parts, fruit and insects, we find him equally paying attention to the waves of the Atlantic Ocean as well as to the ‘same’ water in the form of drops, evaporating on a hot kitchen plate”

When the whole city is in quarantine, the roofs of apartment buildings are transformed into fields of freedom. Fields of expression and existence without restrictions.

LGBTQI + couples show us what it is like to love and be loved over the harsh landscape of Athens.

“Comfortably Wild” is a photography slideshow - an ongoing project, about an existing, real world that is unknown to many of us. It is about the  (r)evolution of the Athenian queer scene and society from 2016 until today, a “miracle” between raw reality and fantasy.

KAVLA is an independent publication of The Queer Archive Festival involving LGBTQI+ artists of all creative backgrounds. Editors Konstantinos Menelaou and Helias Doulis invited artists, writers, poets and thinkers to participate in a queer dialogue of aesthetics and words and to ignite fresh and meaningful conversations around queer experience, art and culture.

Traditional Bird Watching is a form of wildlife observation in which the observation of birds is a recreational activity. The ideal goal of this activity is to recognise and identify different types of birds, however, reaching this goal is not a priority. “Birding” is more about the process, one that has to do with full attention to the surroundings and with slowing down. Through this process, birders (the people performing birdwatching) learn to listen, observe, and to think about what it is that they are seeing, understand behaviours and to exercise their curiosity.

In collaboration with “Shamonette”, The Queer Archive Festival invites you to step on a flamboyant open-top bus tour around the city of Athens, for two full hours. In this fun, fruity and fabulous experience, Aria Divine, our royal hostess, along with Helena Hudson, Marianah Grindr, will be blasting out campy hits and give you a hilarious tour around Athens’ best-known landmarks. 

How is the Greek and especially the Athenian queer art scene defined today? Does such a distinct artistic community exist, what is its character, what is its impact, its influences, its points of reference? How much is queer art accepted and encouraged by educational institutions, organisations and the art world in general? Is there fertile ground for queer artists in Greece, is there interaction with and support from the wider LGBTQA+ community? What impact has the pandemic had on the queer scene?   

Comfort Zone takes perspective on interpersonal relations, drawing parallels between experiences and sidelining what differentiates our identities. The tapestry is woven with juxtaposing natural and industrial fibres and divided into three sections, legible from behind and sensorily elsewhere.

High rank army generals presenting their androgynous body characteristics. A virtuous noble woman wearing a strap-on dildo. A prestigious officer indulging his curves. Herma by Tamir David is a series of drawings and etchings, celebrating the ongoing shifts in social values and gender representation. 

To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause presents video works by artists that deploy music, sound, and storytelling to explore queer narratives. At the heart of the selected works is a desire to share personal experiences and public histories, and to broach ideas around sexuality and gender politics. The notion of performativity is evident in all the works, recalling the writings of José Esteban Muñoz and the utopian potential of the queer aesthetic and subject. 

Tethered is an amalgam of footage recorded from the online platform chatroulette between March and April 2020. It started as voyeuristic practice to witness how the pandemic could be (re)shaping these online channels of communication across the network and it became an exercise of critique on the concept of the saturated self (Gergen). In most cases, during the online visits to the site, the users were given the image of themselves, a sort of feedback of their own immediate reality.

A tribute to the acclaimed avant-pop artist and recently deceased music visionary, Sophie. This short and modest, yet fond, farewell to the most influential trans artist in the modern music industry will take place in Pedion Areos, on Sunday (06/06) around 18:00pm. 

A continuous improvisation of spoken word, along with abstract rhythmic beats created on the synthesizer of Dynno, who developed this form of narrative in 2016 and has since presented their work in dark rooms, during guided tours and group shows. Dada orchestrates a coexistence of conflicting patterns of thought, through a stream of consciousness verbalization, the result of which is left to be directly influenced by the environment and the given circumstances.

George Striftaris' first tools come from his experience as an actor and casting director. It is this experience, imbued with his love for painting, that guides and defines his photographic art. Dedicated, simple, relentless, he manages to encapsulate in his images those dimensions of reality that we miss.

Using the design of a tourist postcard and creating small scale public space installations resembling the layout of tourist shops, we aim to bring to the foreground stories left out of the public sphere based on identity issues. 

The Queer Archive festival joins forces with Hollywood pub, some of the best DJs of the city and performer Pepper Levain for a series of social interventions.

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