Alberto García del Castillo

An enthusiastic group of artists will conduct experiments in our theatre halls and rehearsal spaces or elsewhere. They will ruminate on different ways of living and working: how can you develop an arts practice in times with no live audiences? Output is permitted, but not required!

In this residency, Alberto García del Castillo will carry out collaborative work with artists and activists Fátima Masoud Salazar and Talya Cholet to prepare an experimental and collaborative artistic research project on queer collective approaches to Risk Reduction and the act of gathering.

This research is initiated during the covid-19 crisis, which is hindering the collective practices of queer artists and activists, and aims to foster dissident thinking against healthism. The project examines both models of gathering in the wake of the outbreak of the covid-19 epidemic, and Risk Reduction practices as tools to oppose healthism. Considering a historical controversy between individual and group approaches to Risk Reduction, the project is devised to facilitate questioning the possibility of a collective approach to risk. Claiming a history of queer expertise in community care and dissident thinking since the outbreak of the aids epidemic in the 1980s, this research aims to ask if political discourses on risk can emerge from gatherings of queer artists and activists.

• Alberto García del Castillo is an arts writer and administrator concerned with queer and counter normative approaches to the processes of arts making, and one of the members of Brussels based queer arts initiative Buenos Tiempos, Int. Fátima Masoud Salazar is an artist, and a queer, antiracist and mental health activist, and one of the founders of Orgullo Loco (Mad Pride) in Madrid. Talya Cholet is a writer, queer activist, and socio-sanitary expert living in Paris.