THE KIN AGENCY
We had the chance to interview a person growing up in a household with two mothers, a father, and a brother from birth. At the age of ten, the person added a 50 year old aunt to their kin family. It became evident that the practice of queering was learned from childhood onwards through transparent communication about needs and how to meet them, which formed a backbone for their own queering agency, enabling them to have a self-selected kin family through marriage, care, sex work and more.
Among other testimonies, this story gave us the vision of a kinship agency in all its possible queer facets. We envision the agency as a platform (online/physical) providing practical information for creating, sustaining, and supporting new lived forms of kinship. A community of people who help create contractual agreements for co-parenting, connecting single parents to new kinship, mediating conflicts in co-parenting, separation, moving out and links in many other ways.
A THEATER PLAY
Limb brain meditation
An absurd, poetic, and disturbing theater play between three characters living in the same body. Reptilian is very reactive, impulsive and sometimes aggressive, Limbic is naturally emotional, particularly sensitive and sociable, and Neocortex favors reflection, respecting logic and reasoning. Together, this inner kinship family regularly enters into conversation, trying to mediate different topics within their household.
A PROPOSAL TO THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
First draft of a proposal to the Ministry of Education around a development of a new subject to be taught in schools.
We think of a subject that will focus on well-being and growing social, political, environmental and body awareness based on love as a form of engagement. Love carries qualities of embodied attention and emotional availability, it’s more than a feeling, actively practiced it becomes a choice, an intention that therefore influences how we are present and how we act in the world.
QUEER KINSHIP
The sequel
Coming together as a group of people who all in their own way are looking for alternative kinship filled a gap in the lives of the participants. Feeling enriched, empowered and thankful, full of joy and trust after spending a workweek together, we feel the desire to continue exploring this theme and the possibility of forming a collective of people. Because we believe we just lit the fire and there’s much more burning to do, the next invitation is to go to the countryside for another week of together-mess and join a next laboratory. Within this idea, the first experimental proposal that surfaces is the willingness to embody 15 collectively depicted queer kinship roles, during the durational run of our stay, and investigate where this family constellation would take us.
AN APP TO SUPPORT ALTERNATIVE PREGNANCY PROCESSES
When discussing experiences with reproduction systems, participants shared having to deal with feelings of shame, failure, disempowerment and lack of agency confronted with the patriarchal, sexist elements of the hospital environment. Feeling a desire to support each other, our bodies and a wider group of people having to face these challenges, we dream of creating an application offering body-based exercises and natural supplements to support the violent medical treatments we have to undergo in our endeavors into reproductive practices. On the other hand we want to gather and distribute information about care facilities and commonly used protocols.
IN THE MAKING
A game
Games are spaces where the regular order of reality is suspended so we can invent roles, rules, and structures to imagine true transformations. By playing games in which we designed new kin family models and relations between the roles, we explored what emotions, thoughts and spaces are enabled through moments of fictional family making.
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