QUEERING invites to Biases and Sensuality of Sugary Encounters

Workshop by the international collective i pack* (Jugravu / Kotlar / Gabris). 

We smell racism long before it’s felt. It resides in misconceptions and biases, hides in oriental flavours and Asian spices, and lingers on labels. Food and eating represent the perfect metaphor for telling the story of identity building; food is a central part of the human experience, linked to survival, biases and sensuality, and is frequently used as a cultural marker. While feasts mark felicitous events, hunger strikes can be a powerful form of protest. 

As part of their ongoing research process the artist trio Gabris, Kotlar, Jugravu want to open their sugaring kitchen as safe(r) space for meeting and experimentation inside/with queer BiPOC* communities. Together you will use cooking and baking combined with story telling and writing techniques as tools of inquiry into how racism shapes our perception of food and how to carve a new unbiased queer history.

In this sugary encounter doubling down as a collective cake baking event, you are invited to interrogate and unlearn meanings of resilience, uncook and undo definitions, and create and transform ingredients and recipes. Let us claim back the autonomy of our racialized queer bodies and through these essential processes: cooking and story telling.

Biases and sensuality of sugary encounters will take place at the space of Community center Jako Doma at Prague 8, to which we are very gratefull for this collaboration. 

The workshop wil enable speaking in English, Slovak and Czech+ languages. 

Participation: max. 12 people! Please, register via email: institutuzkosti@gmail.com.

Free of entry.

* an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color 

Collaboration:

i pack* / About Us 
The i pack* is a newly formed autonomous body hosting 3 identities, which fluidly grow together through interdisciplinary artistic and critical engagement. i pack* connects the artists Robert Gabris, Luboš Kotlár and Cat Jugravu in their desire to construct new narratives of the non-binary queer Roma body. i pack* works on concepts of identity, queries of belonging and queer desire against the backdrop of racist biases and the cishet-normative patriarchal society. It hopes to build a stable foundation for a protected space without barriers for its communities and allies.

Cat Jugravu / cat-jugravu.com / is a trans non-binary performance artist, workshop facilitator and theater director born in 1991 in Romania. They are based between Berlin and Salzburg. In 2018, Cat founded the Queerdos Kollektiv / www.queerdos.eu /, alongside which they are growing their practice as an artistic director and workshop facilitator. Their current practice centers the intersections of theater, performance art, embodied transformations and social activism, with a particular focus on LGBTQIA+ communities.

Lubos Kotlar / luboskotlar.com /, also born in 1991, is a photographer, visual artist and curator. His main focus is his own artistic practice, photography, editorial and curator’s work. He is one of the founders and active members of the dsk. artist collective, founded in 2012.

Robert Gabris / robertgabris.com /, born in former Czechoslovakia, is today living and working in Vienna as a freelance artist. He describes the content of his work as a critical confrontation with identity issues, especially confrontations of different groups, excluded from society. The starting point of his work deals with new experimental forms of drawing as resistance to exclusion and racism. Roberts belongs to the Roma ethnic group, but doesn’t define himself as a Roma artist. His work shows a much more constant interest in multiple questions of diverse and convertible identity, the queer body and its existence, possessed in different physical and mental bodies, in relation to normative society and its boundaries.

This event is organised by the Institute of Anxiety as a part of the long-term program QUEERING. AN ENDLESS NUMBER OF POTENTIAL NATURES. QUEERING aims to stimulate inter-disciplinary collaborations to focus on a search for new forms of evolutionary processes, ecological interactions and policies from the perspective of queer and feminist theory.

Photodocumentation (c) Ida Tausch
Graphics (c) Marie Lukáčová

This event is realised as a part of the project QUEERING. AN ENDLESS NUMBER OF POTENTIAL NATURES with a support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Hall and the State Fund of Culture.