Workshop: The game of amoq-ah. AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) PIGS Self-Management

The workshop conducted by AMOQA will examine the vitality and sustainability of self-managed collective projects, taking as a working model the collective design of a game. We will study the contents and rules of the game, as well as its aesthetic format and design.
For three days we will immerse ourselves in a collective adventure within the framework of interdependence (lack of queer feminist spaces in Athens). We will invent survival tools, design dissident itineraries, adopt mutant roles, confront legality (on 10 October 2016, a District Court in Athens turned down AMOQA’s request to be registered as an association [Order 323/2016]. Their refusal was based on the suspicion that AMOQA was‘spreading homosexuality’ and had ‘a hidden commercial agenda’).

We will dance three steps forward, two steps back, while practising self-healing; we will choose between types of assisted mobility (apply for a grant?) and plan rescue operations (solidarity party?); we will rely on collective memory (how do you build a queer feminist archive when you don’t have a sustainability plan?); we will build affinities and experience power and consensual submission (non-authoritarian assembly?).

We will be guided by pleasure, friendship, ideals, personal desires (QUEER ART is FEMINIST is POLITICAL); we will confront the vulnerability of our project and our own (I don’t have a job. I don’t have time for politics. I’m not an artist); we will face collective trials (BIG ART VENUES, NGOS, COPS and Government work together. You are not considered radical anymore. You have lost allies); we will transmit radical tenderness and move in between staged identities and therefore in crisis.

A performative, non-linear game based on real stories and local contexts.

TAGS: sustainability, queer, game, collective organisation, vulnerabilities, performativity.