manifesto

As young queers, we have known firsthand the structures of oppression, constriction, and erasure to which we are – all – subjected. ULTRAQUEER stemmed from the need to respond to a longing for expression: started as an art exhibition, it became a crossroads of practices, methods, and identities to dialogue and take action on the world around us. Born from the work of artists and curators, ULTRAQUEER is a mode of action and cultural production driven by the firm purpose of subverting heteronormative social paradigms.

• We believe in the individual and collective power of artistic expressions to build new realities and worlds that consider our existence’s complexity and divergence. Such a power consists in the ability to question, unravel and gainsay the monolithic and outdated foundations of the system in which we live.

• The new reality we imagine is not so imaginative as denied. We reject those who ascribe our pledges and our intentions to contemporary deviances, blunders of nature given by chance or inadequate education. We oppose such positions with our own organicity, physicality, and humanity; in other words, our reality.

• Our intent is not to regulate or validate any definition of queer. On the contrary, we promote the multiplication of categories of sexuality, identity, and gender, to overcome any imposed canon and build an environment in which each identity is valid, unlimited, and indefinable.

• We will make a pandemic out of ourselves: we will contaminate spaces, bodies, and narratives – from the few to the many, we will invade the normative world. We are hybrid creatures, witches, monsters. We – trans*, outcasts, queers. Against those who use our identities to oppress us, we will not hesitate to use them to fight back. To those who tell us that we are abnormal, anomalous, or sick, we will answer: “we are the cure.”

• We will subvert the dominant aesthetic stereotypes and tear down the cultural fences used to exclude us, so that none would be subject to cultural erasure, forced exclusion, and oblivion no longer; so that anyone would have the same opportunities to draw on and contribute to tradition and cultural diffusion.

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2023. The year of Queer Pandèmia:

Our intentions are inscribed in our name. Queer Pandèmia, as in the Greek words πᾰν (everything) and δῆμος (people), so that queerness be for everyone.