( ) 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 establish contexts, work through differences, establish relationships, but above all we ask questions. Not to gain clarity, but to gain orientation and the ability to act, orienting ourselves as closely as possible to the subjectively experienced reality of life. We probe, listen, discuss, reinforce, intervene, curate, design, mediate, position, contradict. We act alone, together and in different ways, at a high and low-threshold level, between theory and practice, critical reflection and spontaneous activism. Rooted in sub- and counterculture, we want to challenge academic institutions from outside and inside and refuse hegemonic cultural arrogance and dominance. Our drive feeds on a sense of urgency. Getting involved is not a choice, but a political 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

( ) are an open parenthesis and one that closes the insertion or argument. They are markers of an absence: blank, omission, blank space, interruption, free space, placeholder, objection, insertion, hole, void, nothingness. This (in)visibility describes our way of working and at the same time gives space for other kinds of narration, narratives of inclusion and exclusion, of confinement and exclusion, of alienation and othering, of safe(r) spaces and of boundaries. (Re)claiming space. (Im)possible queer space.

( ) are symbols that 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. The space as a place of a transfer, a (trans)action, a transformation. 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 radically physical: two lips forming a vulva. Following a concept of the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, they stand for 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. ( ) is the marking of a hole in the body and refers to gender and as mouth to voice.

( ) stands for sound spreading in waves, language, distribution of information. Eruption, sound waves radiating outward. The sound source itself is a blank space. The brackets perform, define a space and show presence and yet at the same time mark something (in)visible in terms of content, possibly only visible through the conditions/conditions of the marking. This marked, representative void is the visual identifier of the platform, the name of the platform (S-P-A-C-E) is only used in speech, otherwise only the sign to avoid or at least doubt power structures and cultural statements. This Space is a diffuse something through which we want to learn to articulate ourselves. Raising the voice.

( ) are queer principles inherent: the generous and excessive use of parentheses is considered bad style in German 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 want to give space to the discomfort in order not to have to compromise or to push forward assimilation processes, but to be able to show understanding for each other. Understanding for one's own life reality as well as the life reality of others. In doing so, we do not generate an absolute-positivist idea of the world, but convey a feeling of being excluded, of not belonging, of alienation and othering. We do not understand our mediating position as justifying, explaining or instructing but as soft and permeable for other positions and is thus in constant (re)negotiation. In this way, we enter into a position of instability that can prepare us for a sustainable transformation with stubborn serendipity and a certain playfulness.

I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing – I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of a project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in saying what I wanted to say, that I need a new project – it's an absolute nightmare. My whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.
〇 Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Glyn Daly

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