In his trilogy Porca Miseria, Trajal Harrell’s inspiration is the study of “bitches”, aka strong women from literature and history. The key figure of this performance is Maggie, from Tennessee Williams’ classic “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. Thus, Harrell reveals and deconstructs the social fabric of a segregated society, while dancing, voguing and celebrating the American South.

With HOUSE OF HOPE – the first part of the TRILOGY OF TOMORROW – QUEER B-CADEMY sets out on a visionary journey within our own four walls. How do we experience being at home, where and under what conditions do we feel at home? What if we have never felt that way? For four days Kampnagel is being transformed into a home, with a bathroom, open-plan living room and a play area. The heart that seeks a home needs hope. And hope is at the heart of the QUEER B-CADEMY curriculum.

The Day 2 of the 2020 Queer-B-Cademy includes: “SEXXES”, a performance by Mamoru Iriguchi; “BAD LUGANDAN”, a performance by and with Samra Mayanja; a concert by Fayim fka Sidney Frenz; a ballroom dance by Kiki House of Angels; two DJ sets by Seven Angel and Saeleen Bouvar.

The Day 3 of the Queer-B-Cademy includes the following programme: “Ness – The Miracles of oral pleasures”, a workshop with Valentine Tanz; “Tiered Tongues”, a workshop with Samra Mayanja and mother tongues collective; “SEXXES”, a performance by and with Mamoru Iriguchi; “JOY NDUKU” by and with Subira Joy and Wandia Nduku; a concert  by The Muslims; a DJ-Set / Performance by B2BCREW.

The three show days nicely exhausted all of us. But instead of chilling in your own bed, come to Queer B-Cademy’s annual hangover brunch: How do we do in the end of the week? What moved, calmed and touched us? Did we find a new home? Aside vegan treats the table is also set with queered classic board-games developed for last year’s Queer B-Cademy – cause home is where your board game is! A good selection of some sweet sounds from DJ Waxs’ collection will complete the feelgood moment. Come brunch, play and gossip with us!

RECLAIMING HISTORY’s artists and theorists reflect on the colonization of history and its contribution to postulate a stable patriarchal power. Thus, the festival presents unheard narratives. It also practices alternative cultures of remembrance and “herstory” telling. Indeed, the goal is to think of a present and a future that gives both visibility and a voice to those who have been left outside of his-story until now.

The artist Lucy McCormick presents this “as trashy and crass as it is honest and exposing” (The Guardian) performance. Thus, she crawls through the annals of history in this enthusiastically humiliating exploration of power and purpose.

This performance is part of the RECLAIMING HISTORY Festival.

In his new performance, inspired by Derrida, Ariel Efraim Ashbel offers a critical and equally hopeful view on the world’s end. Investigating apocalyptic culture, the show unveils the possibilities and aesthetics of a reality after human kind. Thus, it proposes a revelation: joy without nihilism, optimism without compliance, and fun without irony.

This performance is part of the RECLAIMING HISTORY Festival.

The term AZIMUT – from Arabic السموت , as-sumūt, is a term from astronomy. It means, among other things, “the paths”. Following the traces of colonialism, the young performers of the transnational ensemble Hajusom travelled to their countries of origin. They brought back stories and transformed their memories into choreography and songs, thus creating this multilingual performance.

This performance is part of the RECLAIMING HISTORY Festival.

Under the title THE CHILDREN’S PARLIAMENT, Belgian artist Michiel Vandevelde has been working on a series of projects with Hamburg children and young people between 8 and 13 years of age since the current season. DAS KINDERPARLAMENT is a democracy-building project that deals with the question of what human coexistence, but also the future of all living beings on the planet could look like or how it could be shaped. Michiel Vandevelde investigates what other social, economic and cultural alternatives can be imagined in order to question and change dominant logics and modes of organisation.

The world may be hiding in fear of the catching and the further spreading of the Coronavirus but QUEER B-CADEMY never closed down. Because queer knowledge continues to claim its place on this vulnerable planet Earth. TAKING TO THE STREETS focuses on the public space – a place many take for granted and others consider dangerous, and where they experience exclusion from society. Queer B-Cademy will be defying the mental lockdown. Binging on TV shows can wait. It is the ultimate preparation for reentering public space. A four-day program that will open up all of your energy spots. Air your mind and embrace your spring fever, summon the street spirits of the past, present and future with all the tales of queer life!

WE ARE STILL LOOKING FOR PARTICIPANTS!

The project THE CHILDREN’S PARLIAMENT by the Belgian artist Michiel Vandevelde is a play that deals with the question of what human coexistence on our planet could look like. It will be performed on 09 and 10 October 2021 at Kampnagel, and you can be part of it! Do you like to play theatre and do you want to experiment and tinker with video and sound? Then come to the workshop: Over the course of seven days you will paint the future, practise transforming into other beings, make costumes and shoot videos for the performance.

We are in the future. On the ruins of a failed democracy, small creatures try a reconstruction and test which tools they need to organize their environment. In a strange opening session of this new parliament, where sound recordings, film images, smells, objects and creatures of all kinds come together, the inhabitants of the city are invited to experience, question and construct. The CHILDREN’S PARLIAMENT an installation-based, interactive and multimedia long-term performance developed by renowned Belgian choreographer Michiel Vandevelde. The performance is aimed at younger and older audience members.

The artist collective Baltic Raw Org, with the active support of the Migrantpolitan team, has subjected the wooden house on the Kampnagel site to a general renovation. About the architecture: The redesign of the Migrantpolitan was done in the spirit of Bauhaus: »light, air and sun«, recyclability, circular economy & adaptation by the artist collective Baltic Raw Org. As a long-term and sustainable public space intervention, Migrantpolitan’s building acts as a transition from theatre and urban space. It is located at the intersection of neighbourhood use and cultural production, laboratory & studio, an eco-social retreat, in a word: a platform of possibilities.

Networking as part of the ACT project is an important segment, in which partners are sharing and discussing the activities’ state of the art. This meeting was organised and hosted by Culturgest, Lisbon with participation of other project partners and representatives from: Arts Admin/London, Bunker/Ljubljana, Kaaitheater/Brussels, COAL/Paris, Domino/Zagreb, Kampnagel/Hamburg, NTIL/Riga, Theater Rotterdam/Rotterdam, and Lokomotiva /Skopje.

After the decline of the shipping industry in New York City, the piers stood empty and decayed, but quickly found new life as venues of artistic and sexual expression (cruising) for New York’s gay men. The photographs and accounts from that time bear witness to that brief historical period when queerness could finally be lived with pride and the debauchery of gay sexuality was still untainted by the public stigma of HIV. Together with her performers, the exceptional actress and director Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo, a researcher in gender studies and a dramaturge, examine the lore of these places with regard to the potential they hold for a community of bodies without norms, which is characterised by a longing search for community, a caring in the midst of strangers, but also by excess and freedom of rules. THE PRESENT IS NOT ENOUGH is the contemplation of a “past that becomes a foretaste of the future”.

Latai Taumoepeau is an Australian artist. Her body of work spans more than a decade of presenting cathartic works about the impact and injustice of climate change on low lying islands of the Pacific Ocean. She centered her indigenous concepts of faiva (performance) and fonua (land/body) in her contemporary work to raise awareness and empathy for front line coastal communities. Latai is fully evolving her art practice into a deeper relationship of body and land advocacy through mitigation and adaptation; expanding her cultural performance practice to that of her ancestors for the next ten years. She brings a strong message of sustainability from the global south. Latai lives on the land of the Gadigal and sovereignty was never ceded.

Within the Performative Book Fair (Hamburg), British artist Ama Josephine Budge opens a portal for time travelers with the APOCALYPSE READING NOOK HAMBURG, a traveling mini-variant of her installation “The Apocalypse Reading Room”: Upon entering the cabin, visitors* find themselves in an apocalyptic future – with the invitation to delve into texts that do not primarily look back to what was, but rather try their hand at dreaming as well as practical guidance to new worlds. Stay as long as you like, you have time.

With this 3-day workshop during Hamburg’s May vacations, graphic designer, street art and tattoo artist Hanadi Chawaf invites Hamburg youth to embellish the Kampnagel facade with political art. You like to design and paint, and the protection of species is close to your heart? Over the course of three workshop days, you can create a mural depicting birds that are threatened with extinction here and now in Hamburg. After an expert talk about the threat to biodiversity posed by climate change, the urbanization of natural habitats, and human intervention in protected areas, you and the other participants will select the birds that should not be forgotten by humans and should therefore become part of the mural.

Curated by the world’s premier, green, autistic drag queen Oozing Gloop, Tentacular Spectacular is an (ad)venture into networking networks of narrative, phobia, hope and utopia by showcasing the self made cryptids of 21st century trans* performers. Oozing Gloop is joined by the architect of your eternal suffering, Olympia Bukkakis. Together, these Jesters of the new Dark Age will lure you through a psycho-sexual swamp of fester, rot & future relics. Emerging from this decay are the fruitful offshoots of this tentacular undergrowth; Shrek666, Bonnie Bakeneko and a mystery guest artist working with themes of monstrosity & mulch.

A wet terrain that is the stage and the training ground to find out how to become like Ophelia – embodying the laws that govern a special environment to satisfy the desires and fantasies of others. Water is the element of assimilation and adaptation, a symbol of the limitless capacity for expansion, of an eternal, inseparable unity with the outside world. Symbolically, water is associated with femininity – and with death. An oceanic landscape emerges, full of illusions, cultural and historical references to all kinds of aquatic creatures and drowned strangers, a scenario that not only asks the question… whether training and exercise can help us escape the precarious conditions of the present with climate catastrophes and other disasters to come. It also invites speculation about future life forms that have assimilated these conditions, transformed them and created new forms of being.