( ) s-p-a-c-e is a non-(hetero)normative and post-queer, non-disciplinary and collective practice.

Starting from a diffuse unease with the world, we acknowledge the multidimensional complexity of our realities, emphasising the sociality of marginalised communities and the invisible impact of structural and class dynamics. Rather than to overemphasize similarities we work through the differences which come to light in the borderlands of inclusion/exclusion and focus on a practice of physical relationality and mutuality. We plow with an erratic counter-intuitiveness through generalised knowledge. From our subjective perspectives we don't aim clarity, but want to gain orientation, mobility and the ability to act beyond the limits of politics of identity and representation, sticking to the inadequacy of our selective perception of reality as well as expanding it through experiences of self-reflection and intersubjectivity. We act alone and together, visibly and anonymously. We interfere at a high and low-threshold level, between critical observation, unpaid care labour and spontaneous activism. Our drive feeds on a sense of urgency. Getting involved is not a choice, but a (dis)social necessity.

Have you ever suffered from political despair, from despair about the organization of things? What does it mean to suffer from political despair when your identity is bound up with utopian political aspirations and desires? How is identity reconfigured in the absence or betrayal of those aspirations? What’s the relation between political despair and mourning?
〇 Fred Moten

We are actively involved and rooted in Berlin's queer Techno subcultures and communities. While most of our work is not suitable and consciously evading the seemingly inevitable strategies of representation trapped in the exploitative and censoring algorithms and one-dimensional opinions of social media we aim to make space for multidimensional perspectives in different formats. While writing, lecturing and performing feels unsatisfactory, the practice and experience of raving itself seems more extensive and comprehensive and unintelligible at the same time. It's indissoluble ambiguities challenge straight thinking (Monique Wittig), hegemonic gaze and (herero)normative structures as well as the hypocrisy and fragility of the neoliberal spectacle, anti-social platform feudalist economies and the academic elitism of rational theories.

( ) are an open parenthesis and one that opens and closes the insertion of an additional argument: Markers of an absence as well as of an enrichment of meaning. Omission, interference, blank space, interruption, excess, perspective, addition, placeholder, leftovers, objection, insertion, hole, void, nothingness. (Non)sense and (in)visibility describe our working method to open space for a narration of the alienated Other, dismantling the systemic power dynamics which manifest themselves in framings and categorizations of inclusion/exclusion embracing liminal experiences between death drive and pleasure drive.

( ) denote an interference in the text, a word, a sentence, or a whole section of text. What is inside the two parentheses is additional, supplementary information, simultaneously within and separated from the main text. Through this enclosure, known as bracketing, parts are delimited in terms of content or functionally altered. The empty space made visible by this artifice (emptiness, as we know, is not visible per se) is intended to provide space for alternative narratives and squeaked perspectives. Brackets within a word hold meaning in a contradictory and often paradoxical ambiguity (confusion possibly bringing clarity) that allow for an unstable, open-ended viewing of content. Empty space and non-space mark a place of transfer, (trans)action and transversality. A space where simultaneously nothing and everything happens.

When Our Lips Speak Together, in which [Luce] Irigaray critiques both unitary and binary ways of thinking by focusing on the morphology of the labial lips. They are the 'sex which is not one.' They are not one, but also not two. They make a circle that is always self-touching, an autoerotic mandorla.
〇 Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

( ) is physical and subjective. Following a concept of the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, they symbolize labia: 'Outside the realm of emoticons, parentheses always come in pairs'. They complement each other, face each other, reference each other, create friction, enclose, are independent, and yet only function together, together making a whole, a whole that is more and different, like the two parts. Typically, the words inside the parentheses provide extra information about something else in the sentence (relational in the overall context and relational as designating the place to be filled). Intimacy and protection, mystery and myth, the marking of a hole in the body which refers to the social and cultural construct of gender roles as well as to a mouth to voice and communicate.

( ) is the experience of sound spreading from a source in waves, distribution of noise and information. Waves erupt and radiate outward while the source is a blank space. The brackets embrace and mark something empty – (in)visible in terms of content, present through conditions of the mark. The evidenced void is a visual identifier representing nothing/everything.

( ) are queer principles inherent: the generous and excessive use of parentheses is considered bad style in writing (nesting of sentences, disruption of the functionality of language). ( ) is cross-system and both linguistic and numerical sign. In mathematics, parentheses express, among other things, a preference, a precedence of one arithmetic operation to be performed over others in the arithmetic sequence. In higher mathematics, they denote arguments of a function. In many programming languages, they are used to group different types of program elements.

As queers we understand Normalcy. Normal, is the tyranny of our condition; reproduced in all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently reiterated in every minute of every day. We understand this Normalcy as the Totality. The Totality being the interconnection and overlapping of all oppression and misery. The Totality is the state. It is capitalism. It is civilization and empire. The totality id fence post cruxification. It is rape and murder at the hands of police. It is 'Str8 Acting' and 'No Fattier or Femmes.' It is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is the brutal lessons taught to those who can’t achieve Normal. It is every way we’ve limited ourselves or learned to hate our bodies. We understand normalcy all too well… We must create space wherein it is possible for desire to flourish. This space, of course, requires conflict with this social order. To desire, in a world structured to confine desire, is a tension we live daily. We must understand this tension so that we can become powerful through it — we must understand it so that we can become powerful through it — we must understand it so that it can tear our confinement apart.
〇 Mary Nardini Gang: Toward the Queerest Insurrection

We acknowledge discomfort and potential of marginalized realities, not to surrender to assimilation processes, but to unlearn systemic conditions and to show acceptance for the unconscious in ourselves and the unknown in each other. We refuse an absolutist and positivist idea of the world, of moral superiority and systemic fragility, individual wellbeing and selfcare in favour of resilience and sensitivity. The negativity of being excluded and of not belonging does not dissolve or heal but canalizes in an intersubjective ability to act. We do not justify, explain or instruct but embrace a position of instability, stubborn serendipity and the curiosity for the Other.

After a period of self-determined personnel changes, a critical reflection on our own inadequacies, (self)exploitation, class and power struggles and a consequent reorientation of our activities ( ) s-p-a-c-e consists of three active members and a network of relationships of irregularly involved individuals.

xan egger

xan (*1971) is a self-chosen name that is also part of their given name Alexander; x stands for queering and is thus resistant action; x denotes the female chromosome; x is intersectional salience and is read as intersecting vectors of movement that mark a temporary but significant point of view; x in the mathematical equation describes a variable instead of a static and authentic self; x signifies a connecting symbol of two independent entities-saying that the two entities collaborate-and is thus relational.

xan egger has been working as a writer, researcher, educator, concept developer, curator, designer and artist in Milan, Vienna and Berlin, among other places. Being nonbinary, queer, white, originating from a border region and with a working class background, xan is interested in world-making through imagination and politics of transversality, in the fluidification of rigid cultural binaries, internalized power structures and institutionalized control, in the social evaluation of hegemonial reference systems, in the ambiguification of categories and hierarchies, in strategies and tactics of subjective and collective non-representation and action with a focus on marginalized groups and narratives, (counter)cultural framings and kinship. Frayed seams and sharp-edged overlaps are just as exciting as shifts, eruptions, glitch, noise, infiltrations, differences, dissonances, blurs, translations, recordings, obfuscations and discrepancies.

xanegger.com
@xan.dokan

Mascha Naumann

Mascha (*1998) is a Berlin-based multimedia artist, researcher and passionate raver and club worker, mainly working as a bartender. The closure of the club Griessmühle and the resulting loss of their former long-time-employee made Mascha aware of the social significance of queer nightlife for the first time. With the outbreak of the pandemic and the shutdown of the entire nightlife, there was another break that redefined Mascha's own (queer) position in hegemonic society. Mascha's artistic practice challenges and critiques the academic art establishment by pointing out power structures and the display and exploitation of subcultural capital. Mascha's performance pseudonym LAV ENDER is thereby a tool to explore the difference between queer community and academic art context, to become aware of one's own exposure and to find means to archive the personal transformation process.

@lav.ender.end

wro wrzesińska

wro wrzesinska (*1989) is a Berlin-based queer, non-binary digital artist. wro works with new media and creative technologies such as 3d animation, video, projection, mapping, and visual programming software and uses them in collaborative projects including performance and installation formats. wro graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland, with a BA in Visual Communication. wro's work lies at the intersection of art, technology, and enchantment, exploring ways to push the boundaries of the personal and embodiment in the digital environment. inspired by the process of becoming, spaces ‘in between’ and feminist ecologies, wro uses these lenses in a queer speculative storytelling to investigate ways of manifesting physicality and identity in flux in the digital space.

@wro_xyz