HACKING ANTI-COLONIAL KUIR POETRY THROUGH THE TROPICS

Our concept for the Magical Hackerism web residency is, through Futura Trōpica Netroots, 1) to convey, connect, and share KUIR’s contents with participant networks from Colombia, DR Congo, and India, and to aim at strengthening a disruptive, southern, and especially cis-hetero non-normative perspective as for the current colonial world order; 2) to possibly enact a repository upon other practitioners’ experiences in the encounter with KUIR’s content (How are poetries/performances/texts experimented with and received by them? What connections to their reality would they then be able to formulate? Which other works by LBTQIA+ artists are known from their circles?), imaginably in the format of a counterarchive of voice; and 3) to establish a dialogue that through a collective of futurity created in the present serve as a netting to share sound reverberations.

 

KUIR POETRY is an independent, collaborative, collective, and multilingual project of LBTQIA+ poetry and performance from an anti-colonial perspective. Since its foundation in 2019, KUIR has been present in Berlin, São Paulo, and Thessaloniki. Amidst the pandemic and with local funding from Projektförderung Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain, KUIR POETRY launched an online magazine in 2020 with commissioned videos, articles, and illustrations from trans*_racialized_migrant artists from the Global South. In 2022, KUIR POETRY has organized an online festival, bringing together works, thoughts and music of artists from Syria, Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Berlin.

kuirpoetry.com

Jô Osbórnia (she/her) is a poet, performer, translator, and curator from Rio de Janeiro. She has been living in Berlin for six years, to which she migrated with a scholarship from Haus für Poesie/Poesie Festival Berlin after Brazil’s 2016 coup d’état. In her artistic works, Jô is interested in questions of gender and colonialism. From her position as a migrant travesti in Europe, she intends to reflect on poetic and performative languages that might imply anti-colonial thinking/attitudes within the metropolis. She has participated in residencies at Thessaloniki Queer Art Festival (2019), where she conducted the series of creative writing workshops »Kuir Trauma and Poetry« and »(Re)Writing Kuir Mythologies« for young adults; and at Fundaziun Nairs in Scuol (2020), where she presented a performance entitled »Anti-kolonialer Sündenbock.« Her works have been presented at Poesie Festival Berlin (2020, video poem »Eü«), at Goethe-Institut Barcelona (2021, video poem »The monolith dilemma») and at Oyoun Berlin (2022, poem-installation »A GAZE THAT DON’T SEE ME«), upon the completion of »Becoming Alman« residency. She is one of the founders of KUIR Poetry, a literary, performance, and communitarian project about queer poetry from an anti-colonial perspective, awarded with funds from Projektförderung Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain (2020 and 2021). Her writings are mainly in Portuguese/Brazilian and German. Besides her artistic endeavors, Jô also works as a German teacher for migrants in Berlin. She is finishing her B.A. in Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Jota Ramos (born in 1989, BraSil) is a transmasculine nonbinary multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Beginning with autobiographical artistic experiments, Ramos explores the practices of performance, video, installation, photography, and poetry. Creating peripheral dissident subjectivities that dialogue with symbolic, etymological, and Black and gender identity references, he seeks to bring a poetic reflection as a healing space thinking about how to portray the authenticity of the brown body in a genuine way, as a light-skinned Black person. His research investigates tools to build an antiracist and powerful representation of Black queer people’s sociality, identity, and their historical journey. He is currently studying direction at FilmArche in Berlin and has a postgraduate degree in applied social science where he researched female Afro-entrepreneurship in the southern region of Brazil. Residencies include Corpo – Acumulo at Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana in Porto Alegre (2019); Our Stories at Jamaica Performing Arts Center in New York (2019); Atlas of Transition Performing Arts and Migration in Bologna (2020); Carolinas at Flup (Periphery Literature Festival) in Rio de Janeiro (2020); and Tracce Residence in Conversano (2021). His works have been exhibited in Portugal, Italy, United States, Switzerland, Brazil, and Germany. The most recent exhibitions took place at Circle 1 Gallery, Oyoun Cultural Center, Acud Macht Neu, Lona Galeria, Vae Raleigh, Espaço Itinerante, Escola de Belas Artes, Museum im BellPark, LaBottega Laboratorio Urbano and Wedding film. In 2022, he took part in the residency »INcorporAÇÕES e Cruzas Poéticas« at MARGS (Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul) in Porto Alegre and is now represented in the museum collection. He is currently taking part in the Panorama art residency at the Afropolitan in Berlin and in the performance exhibition at Galeria Vermelho and Chão SLZ. He is also one of the six international artists selected for the PerfocraZe mentoring program in Ghana, and is scheduled to attend both the QUEERWEEK22 at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and the DISKURS Festival in Giessen.