Live performance for 5 hours
As part of “Movement Research Center” program held by Galerie Wedding
Curated by Malte Pieper and Maja Smoszna
with Derin Cankaya
Occupying coast, stringing out lines addresses to build lines for queer intimacy and desire in the pandemic time. The project focuses on reclaiming space as non-western queerness and creating new ways of careful togetherness in a queer manner; can be also seen as a seek for getting over the feelings of heaviness coming from isolation and mourning for corporal proximities.
Aiming to break victimisation discourses on non-Western queerness and create a new image of “Global southeast” queer migrant in joy, pleasure and strength, Darıcıoğlu invites Derin Cankaya for sunbathing with her* on the sun-beds¶sols. Occupying coast, stringing out lines begins with Darıcıoğlu and Cankaya’s sunbathing at the stairs of the Job Center office, Wedding during its closing time. They occupy the stairs that they can’t apply during the working time as non-European citizen and migrants with limited time visas. Sunbathing turns out into an act of reclaiming public space while their presence in front of the Job Center, brings precarity into the frame. They seek warmth, joy, pleasure and safety at the square in front of the Job Center for 5 hours while exploring the potentials of the Job Center square.
Occupying coast, stringing out lines engages with Munoz-ien concept of utopia expressed within his words become classic in decolonial queer movements and communities:
“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. There here and now is a prison house… we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds… Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.”1
Incited by the idea of a future where we would touch queerness and live it, Occupying coast, stringing out lines wanders around border policies, precarity, joy, safety, domination and queerness and draws open ending lines while leaving temporal marks into the public space.