The Pink Cube Newsletter - December 2024

Season's greetings from The Pink Cube!

Author

Arlo van Lierop
December 23, 2024

Palari #4: Skills, collectivity and queering education - January 5th 2025

Back to school with artist and art educator Kirti Soekaloe.

After the holidays, many of us have to face a harsh reality: the school year continues. To ease the transition from festive dinners and hangovers to lecture halls, we present a back-to-school edition of Palari. How can we de-hierarchise and renew art education through a queer lens? What does it mean to collectively ‘unlearn’ and share knowledge in a playful, non-oppressive way? During this edition of Palari: Queer Salons, we will explore the potential of collective knowledge creation, non-hierarchical exchange and queer pedagogy within the art world together with Kirti Soekaloe. It will be a playful and connecting afternoon, offering space for reflection, experimentation and stepping into each other's shoes through a playful exchange of skills and ideas. With themes such as discomfort, collectivity, crosslinking and creative problem solving, this edition of Palari offers a unique opportunity to look at art education from a queer perspective. Expect an afternoon of inquisitiveness, playful interaction and critical reflection in a cozy and communal setting.

Palari #4 takes place on January 5th, 17:00 at Grand Theatre. As always, you can pay what you want for tickets or contact us if you are unable to pay but would still like to come.

Kirti Soekaloe (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator based in Rotterdam. With a background in Media & Culture, Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Fine Art and Art Education, Kirti brings experiences as an artist and developer of educational art projects to this programme. Kirti collaborates with art institutions such as TENT, Melly, MaMA and Framer Framed, and a.o. gives queer and decolonial master classes for education teams. Kirti´s work is rooted in a pedagogy of discomfort, breaking stigmas around collectivity and creating learning environments where social safety and accessibility are paramount.

Agenda

  • January 5th: Palari #4: Skills, collectivity and queering education

  • January 20th: Our Exquisite Corpse at Usva (20:30, free entry)

  • March 2nd: Palari #5 (save the date!)

Retrospective: Our Exquisite Corpse at What You See Festival

Eight students of the master Contemporary Dance, Theatre and Dramaturgy at the University of Utrecht visited What You See Festival and wrote reviews. Sara Gancedo Lesmes wrote a wonderful review about Our Exquisite Corpse, which you can read below.

By Bete van Meeuwen

Our Exquisite Corpse: What you leave, what you take

When you enter the downstairs room of Theatre Kikker, the lights are dim and the conversations that float in the air are quiet and intimate. On the walls, the light illuminates a series of photographs: this is the exhibition ON HOLD by Prins de Vos, which portrays queer people in the Netherlands who are waiting for gender-arming care. The models pose casually in their houses, most of them alone. You walk around, looking at them. They often look back, but their expressions remain indecipherable, suspended in the timeless time of the waiting.

You take your time to approach the part of the room that remains illuminated: a long wooden table, its surface almost completely covered by pieces of fabric and sewing supplies. Around it, seven people are sitting, chatting and embroidering. There are still a few empty chairs, so you sit down at the further end.

"Do you know what we are doing here?", someone asks in front of you.

This is Arlo, as you will find out in a few moments.

You hesitate, briefly.

"It is not an exam", another person says next to you. This is Iris. "We just want to know how much we need to explain".

You do know what they are doing, but you still want to hear it directly from them. As they explain, this is the latest iteration of Our Exquisite Corpse, a project by the queer platform The Pink Cube (Arlo van Lierop and Iris Rijnsewijn). It aims to create a collective quilt, to which anyone can contribute by embroidering as many tiles as they want. The time spent by all involved is tracked and it will be summed up until the total reaches 1.314.900 minutes, that is, 30 months: the average waiting time for gender-arming care in the Netherlands. You can almost feel the subjects in the photos on the wall looking at the table, overseeing this collective act of solidarity and protest.

You quickly feel welcome here. The Pink Cube are gentle in their explanations and they assure you that you need no experience to participate as they pass you the embroidering materials. You get the chronometer on your phone running just before you start trying to thread your needle. Meanwhile, you can't help but listen to the conversation happening on the other side of the table about the difficulties of using gender-neutral language in Italian. In a few minutes, an elderly woman will sit in front of you and will share her struggle to "keep up" with pronouns, but also her fierce desire to protect trans children from anyone who tries to hurt them. The embroidery table, as you soon realise, has become a site for (queer) conversation, a safe place to discuss, gossip and share.

Collective sewing practices have an extensive historical connection with social movements. From anti-slavery sewing circles in XIX century England to the arpilleras in Pinochet’s Chile, they have long been a way for women to get together and organise resistance. This spirit resonates with Our Exquisite Corpse; but this project specially echoes the AIDS Memorial Quilt, composed by thousands of quilt panels, each one of them honouring the name of a person lost to AIDS. In the time you spend on the embroidery table, you manage to make a simple circle of white thread on your blue piece of fabric. It looks somewhat flimsy, somewhat thin, but it is round and done and you feel something akin to pride. You leave it on the table for another person to complete. Even if brief, the time spent at Our Exquisite Corpse has had the peaceful quality of an evening doing crafts with friends. This initiative, you realise, does not only raise awareness of the long waiting lists to get gender-arming care in the Netherlands. It also takes the painful 21.900 hours of average waiting and it turns them into something different: shared time in a community.

By Bete van Meeuwen

I Saw the TV Glow too

A cozy film tip for the holidays <3

Brigette Lundy-Paine and Justice Smith as Maddy and Owen

Iris Rijnsewijn

Before I start: SPOILER WARNING! Okay, now that you’ve been warned: let's talk. I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun, 2024) follows Owen, an introverted teenager living in the suburbs, in a coming-of-age psychological horror drama. After meeting Maddy, they bond over their shared love of the television show The Pink Opaque, a show Owen can usually not watch, as it airs past his bedtime. On top of that, his father (portrayed by none other than Fred Durst who delivers his singular line in the movie beautifully), accusingly asks him ‘isn’t that a show for girls?’. Owen and Maddy agree to have sleepovers so Owen can watch the show, and Maddy sneaks him tapes whenever he misses an episode. Then things escalate, Maddy goes missing, and the show is canceled not long after. Years later, when Maddy resurfaces (literally, in a way) Owen learns that he is living life in an alternate universe, namely in The Pink Opaque, and his real self, a teenage girl with psychic powers, is buried underground in another realm. However, he refuses to believe this and the movie ends suddenly after we see Owen continuing to live and age as the man he is in this reality.

Recently the movie served as inspiration for a TikTok trend. Seeing the TV glow means you found your true self, and trans individuals have used the trend to show their transition with the first song from the soundtrack of the movie (please check out the full soundtrack, it slaps). Some people added ‘and I shut it off’, meaning they, like Owen, did not follow their true selves. One thing that got me thinking was another addition of ‘but he/she/they live(s) on in…’, accompanying a description of something that makes them feel closer to their true self. This reminded me of my younger self. I was always more boyish, maybe partly due to internalised misogyny, but also because I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about fitting in with gender stereotypes. I went from being mistaken for a boy to off-brand Justin Bieber (does anyone remember the Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber website? Not a single unique experience in this world, I guess) to the more feminine presentation I have today. Before I realised I was a lesbian, I first stumbled upon FtM YouTube and it did not feel very distant from how I was feeling. I suppose the label lesbian called my name louder at the time, but I saw the TV glow too, and he lives on in wearing ties, contouring my face to look more masculine, comparing myself to a masculine physique in the gym, occasionally wearing a binder and feeling joy when my parents call me ‘jochie’, among so many other things.

The movie became popular with the transgender community, adopting the phrase ‘there is still time’ to encourage other closeted trans people to come out, no matter their age. For everyone who comes out to one of our public sessions to participate in Our Exquisite Corpse, we made a poster based on this phrase as a gift. They are hand-printed using letterpress printing blocks and reproduced on the risograph, both at GRID Grafisch Museum. So stop by at our next session. For now, we wish you happy holidays, and good luck to those who saw the TV glow but have to turn it off while visiting family. We see you.