Palari #5: The great big queer zine of Groningen - March 2nd 2025

Speak out about queer life in Groningen and join us in making a collective zine!

You, queer person in Groningen, you must be aching to speak up. You must be so angry and afraid of the rising bigotry towards queer people in our city. You must be so disappointed at the low amount of queer spaces this city offers. Or maybe you don’t care about that too much. Maybe you only care about the bar where you first laid eyes on your lover. Maybe you always remembered the bench in Noorderplantsoen where your best friend first told you their new name. Maybe you remember the coffee places, picnic blankets, parking lots and protest spaces where you and your loved ones created queer havens of your own.

For this fifth edition of Palari: Queer Salons we invite you to join us in mapping queer life in Groningen in a collective zine, under the guidance of zine-maker Marieke Pras. A zine is a diy booklet where the most important rule is that there are no rules. It can be a political publication, a collection of poems, or a series of doodles. Most of all, a zine documents the lived experience of its makers. How do you experience being queer in Groningen? What do you want to change? Why do you feel safe here, if you feel safe at all? What is your favorite memory about this city? 

Palari #5 takes place on March 2nd, 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.

The Pink Cube at IFA 2025

International Film Festival Assen is a four-day film festival that focuses on the role of women in front of and behind the camera. It’s one of the oldest film festivals with an intersectional feminist approach, and the only one in the Netherlands that centers around women.

This year, the Pink Cube will be bringing the works of three trans artists that we know and love to the festival to accompany a four-day session of Our Exquisite Corpse. You will find their work scattered around the venue before being able to join us in working on our collective quilt together.

IFA will take place at De Nieuwe Kolk in Assen, from March 6th until March 9th. You can find us in the entrance hall of the movie theatre. See you there!

Agenda

• March 2nd: Palari #5: The great big queer zine of Groningen

• March 6 - 9: Our Exquisite Corpse at IFA

• March 22nd: Our Exquisite Corpse at Groninger Museum

New team members!

We welcome Edward and Ivona to the team, who will be helping out with communication and this very newsletter! From their respective art practices they will be looking into expanding our newsletter, both in terms of content and audience.

A blissful pile of candy

How to dumb down heart-wrenching art.

_{Arlo van Lierop}

It seems like every time a new newsletter rolls around we have the opportunity to write about queer censorship in art. I’m no political scientist, but I’m sure the current climate doesn’t help. I work in mostly queer environments both inside and outside of The Pink Cube, and I notice a sense of anxiety almost everywhere. Especially where important decisions are made. Looking back on the past couple weeks, or even months, a lot of crossroads in our work ended with us or those above us deciding not to do or say a certain thing, fearing repercussions. Maybe that was the case at the Smithsonian as well, although I might be giving them the benefit of the doubt.

If you’ve ever attended one of our lectures you’ll have heard us talk about this artwork, because we talk about it every single time. Felix Gónzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a pile of candy displayed in the corner of the room. The most important thing when installing the work is that the pile weighs exactly 175 pounds. This was the body weight of Ross Laycock, Gónzalez-Torres’ partner, before he got sick and eventually passed away from AIDS. Visitors are invited to take pieces of candy from the pile, allowing them to partake in the sweetness of Ross and keeping a piece of him with them, while also contributing to his physical decline and the process of dying. 

This week, an opinion piece by queer art scholar Ignacio Darnaude was circulating after seeing the work on display in a retrospective of Felix Gónzalez-Torres work called Always to Return at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. The Smithsonian curators astonishingly managed to omit all of the above context in the wall text by the work. Aside from the title, Ross’ name is not mentioned. The label mentions 175 pounds to be its ‘ideal weight’ instead of ‘ideal body weight’, stripping the weight of the work of all its significance. The work itself is installed in a straight line along the wall of the museum, instead of a pile in the corner. The wall text describes an ‘endless supply’ of candy, suggesting the amount is replenished over time. 

I have never met a single person who, upon hearing the context of this work, is not absolutely destroyed by it. I’ve seen the wave of emotion ripple through the audience when describing the work in our talks. I’ve felt the dead silence that follows it after explaining it. When your audience is seen “blissfully taking pictures of pretty candy”, as Darnaude describes, you are doing something wrong. Since the publication of the opinion piece, the Smithsonian have posted a response on their Instagram page that unfortunately doesn’t provide any further context on the work, but instead seems to be a justification on why they chose to install it the way they did. The post repeats a separate label seen in the exhibition space that states the museum is entitled to "decide the size and configuration for this installation as well as to whether to replenish the candy" as per Gónzalez-Torres’ instructions. I’m not disputing that, but insisting on this ownership of the work after the artist’s death, from the same disease you chose to erase, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The exhibition has been on view since October of last year, but this story broke in the same week as the news that Trump is freezing funding for the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PREPFAR). Now more than ever, we need museums and exhibition spaces to critically reflect on the implications of their installations and the decisions they make. Or the ones they don’t make.