FEXXX (18+)

The programme doesn’t conform to the established idea of visibility as a prerequisite for freedom and (self-)engagement. Visibility can be a tool but also a trap: a promise of recognition that demands accessibility, readability and adjustment to the narrow understanding of the ‘norm’. Who can be visible without consequences? Who is being watched before they are even identified? Who must disappear so they can survive? In film and art, the gaze is never innocent but conditioned by power relations and the unevenly distributed access to safety and representation.

As a result, the films of the programme interpret the darkness as its more dangerous, elusive notion rather than an evasion from politics. In Plenum in The Faggot House, the evasion materialises as a community home, a collective body, and the infrastructure of the fight against gentrification, capitalist aggression, and heteronormativity. Archeology of Lesbian Desire constructs a dreamy 16-mm anti-archive of lesbian erotica from suppressed gestures, touches, and gazes. In Ecstasy, a mausoleum, a black hole, and a mystical experience meld into an eerie land of pleasure, subversion, and body transformation. Paris Model uses found footage and analogue film techniques to deconstruct the body as an object of gaze and reconstruct it as flesh, phantasm, and desire. Shame, with its grandiose visuals, sounds, and humour, explores the concept of shame in Arab cultures, in which عيب (shame) is not only a word but also a social mechanism: an order, a prohibition, and a warning that dictates norms, gender roles, and the possibilities of expressing identity. The film The Archive: Queer Nigerians shows that invisibility isn’t necessarily a choice but rather the consequence of historical violence and that archiving could be the solution to the imposed oblivion.
Spaces of Evasion do not romanticise darkness. They consider it a means of survival, an aesthetic tactic, and a political gesture. These films do not ask for permission to be seen. What they do ask is who is watching, from which position, based on what urge, and with what right. The queer histories and presents don’t get lost in the darkness. They rather gather there, whispering, having fun, and building relationships, which don’t transform to be acceptable but become and remain a pleasure, a disturbance, and a threat to the status quo.

Sasha Ihnatovich, Jasmina Mustafić, Jelena Radić