Shaking the Habitual + Dragana Bar | Kem at Galeria Municipal do Porto

A generous invitation from João Laia brought Kem to Porto, Portugal in 2024, where we were able to contribute to the public programme of forms of the surrounding futures - an exhibition bringing together diverse perspectives on the materialisations of queer utopia.

Our presence in Porto was foreshadowed and maintained by the presence of our neon within the exhibition itself. The pink triangle inside a green circle evokes a history of resistance to queerphobia through the repurposing of the pink triangle by the ACT UP movement. It gestures towards a safer space.

Subsequently, our week-long residency at Galeria Municipal do Porto kicked-off with Shaking the Habitual - a workshop devised by Kem in collaboration with Ania Nowak, during which we approached speaking, moving, reading and writing as acts of embodiment and interdependence. We worked with notions of habit, attachment and accessibility to create time and body-based scenarios for making our personal and political feelings approachable. If society is broken and we are divided, how can improvisation become a tool for expanding our capacity for delight and discomfort? How is consensual social intimacy created? What does disobedience look and feel like today and tomorrow?

The US-American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant wrote “Cruel optimism is about how people will stay in relation to their object even if it destroys them because they can’t bear giving up the pleasure of knowing the world in a particular way.” What other knowledges of the world do we desire to develop today? How to bear this amount of pleasure and pain together? Throughout this workshop, we used choreographic, performative and self-help strategies to work with and against the definitions and attention economies that rule our everyday.

The public programme was also constitued by an evening of open lectures, to which we invited our long-term collaborator Liz Rosenfeld, who gave a fantastic lecture-performance titled a queer (un)doing?: inside an unspecified something or somewhere, during which they spoke to the limitations of unlearning, the potentialities of holes and their own complex autobiography. This was preceded by a short lecture by Kem, during which we provided a glimpse into our own artistic strategies.

We also had the divine pleasure of hosting Dragana Bar - our queer club night, at Passos Manuel in Porto, as part of the programme. The lineup brought back a legendary duo - our very own Facheroia and local DJ Onio, who played a b2b at one of the first ever Draganas back in 2017. They played alongside our resident androgienia and a tantalising performance à rebours by the iconic Filipka Rutkowska.

We want to thank João Laia for the invitation as well as Collectivos Plaka and Galeria Municipal do Porto for hosting us so generously.