In this workshop, Athens Subsumption will introduce collaborative exercises and tools to cruise Athens. Together we will queer urban potentials and reclaim political, economic and social desires within the cityscape to produce transformative mappings. Guided by José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia we will reimagine queerness to inscribe the city with the potentiality of another world. Leaving behind traces for others to discover, we will revel in possibilities of performing and forwarding utopic futures of queerness. Reading, walking, passing through, biographing objects and sending messages for those who listen and notice. Coming together with people unknown both, past and future, intrigued by the sensuality of place, to stimulate spontaneous, uncharted encounters within the city. The methods we develop while cruising, are intended to become an instigator for continuity of transformations. 

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“QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present”. José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, 2009. 

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The workshop will be conducted in English. Bring along any type of recording device (phone - camera - sound-recorder - notebook etc). 

 

 

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Athens Subsumption, is a multidisciplinary group of scholars, artists and architects first assembled in Athens in November 2014. The collective is co-building a generative practise of geographic urban interactions that are both playful and revealing. By combining critical theory with global economic trends, our current practice explores the power dynamics within the realms of desire, commodification, love and ritual, through unexpected site-specific social interventions. 

So far, the group has responded to various intertwined themes, related to identity, utopia and visual representation as in Glossary of Subsumption: Enclosed Athens disclosed [Trasmediale, Berlin 2015], Your dream job HERE [ASFA BBQ, Athens 2016], Wake Up Now: Full Disclosure, Documenta 14 Sellout [Women's Work in Revolt!, D14, Athens 2017], The end of tourism as we know it [Athens/Lefkada/Tinos, 2017-18], Cruising the Erotic City [Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival, Thessaloniki 2019]. 

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http://www.subsumption.space/blog/