<nettime> Queer Dada! join us March 30th 6PM CET

Dear Nettimers

it's with great pleasure that I'd like to invite all of you to join this crazy performative event , Queer Dada, which is part of our Digital Delights and Disturbances lecture series at John Cabot University, we had the pleasure to welcome many members of this community when we were hosting these events on campus

Hopefully in better times we will restore 'presence' but, for the moment, this is the temporary solution we've found to get rid of Zoom meetings and find new ways of 'embodiment' in the age of social distancing

Hope you'll join us, info and RSVP on poster

cheers, dona

Are you tired of gazing at yourself in endless Zoom meetings?

Are you sick of the flatness of the Brady Bunch style?

Do you dream of ways out of our daily digital boredom?

Are you appalled by yes or no answers, by black or white pronouncements, by good or evil evaluations?

Are you wondering why the world is divided into the binaries of this or that, up or down, male or female and the zeros and ones of binary code?

Do you dream of escaping from classification, quantification, and the tyranny of metrics?

Do you want to free yourself from binaries and binary codes?

Come join ‘Queer Dada’, an ode to fluidity, a celebration of creativity Dada-style.

Queer Dada is a live performance featuring queer, non-binary and trans-human creatures from across nations, genders, and the intersections that make up the human species.

It is a trans-space inhabited by artists reaching out from beyond cultural boundaries, gender binaries and the violence of the Anthropocene.

Queer Dada is hosted by Comm·e the robot, who will be live-possessed by artists performing remotely from Brazil, the US, the Netherlands, Jordan, and Italy. In compliance with safety protocols to contain the spread of Covid-19, Comm·e shall be in the company of one human only, System Hardware Abnormal, who will play live music from the empty Aula Magna at John Cabot University in Rome.

Respecting social distancing rules, with the help of mighty trans creatures, we pay a tribute to queerness and the fluidity of dada, in defiance of a quantified and sad world of metrics, binaries and binary codes.

Artists’ bios

Drew Pham (They/She) is a queer, transgender writer of Vietnamese heritage. A child of war refugees, her work centers on legacies of violence in times of conflict. She has published in Blunderbuss Magazine, McSweeny's, Slice Magazine, Foreign Policy, Time Magazine, The Daily Beast, and Columbia Journal, among others. She lives with her two cats in Brooklyn, NY, and she serves as an adjunct English lecturer at CUNY Brooklyn College.

Raphael Amahl Khoury (They/He) is a trans artist hailing from Jordan and who lives between Berlin and the Middle East. He is the author of various plays and documentaries having queerness as the central theme. Among his works figures ‘She He Me’, staged at Vienna’s Kosmos Theatre in 2019. Khoury is also of the Climate Change Theater Action that takes care of representing environmentalism on stage.

Natalia Borges Polasso (She) is a researcher,writer, and translator. She published Amora (2015), winner of Prêmio Jabuti; Controle (2019), shortlisted for Prêmio São Paulo de Literatura; and, Corpos Secos (2020). In 2017, Natalia was included in the list Bogotá39, which brings together the 39 most prominent writers under 40 in Latin America. Her work is translated into several countries, such as Argentina, Spain and the United States.

Simon(e) Van Sarloos (They/She) is a writer and artist. They published several books, among which Playing Monogamy. Her most recent book in Dutch, Herdenken herdacht, is a non-fiction work about queer forgetfulness, whiteness and embodied commemoration. Together with Kübra Uzun, Simon(e) recently created an audio installation work called Cruising Gezi Park (Amsterdam Museum) and she is the host of The Asterisk Conversations podcast. From May to October 2021, they are the guest curator of an ABUNDANCE themed exhibition at Het Hem, Zaandam. www.simonevansaarloos.nl

Allison Grimaldi-Donahue (She) is a poet, writer, and translator with Italian American origins. She is the author of Body to Mineral (Publication Studio Vancouver 2016) and of On Endings (Delere Press 2019). She publishes on Another Gaze, Prairie Schooner, los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, FlashArt, Nero and other magazines. She designed performances at Gavin Brown Rome and Hyper Maremma in 2019. She was writer-in-residence at New York Center for Book Arts and at Bread Loaf Conference and artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA and MAMbo, Bologna. Her translation of Autoritratto by Carla Lonzi is published in 2021 by Divided Publishing.

System Hardware Abnormal (They) is a multi-faceted musician. As Demented Burrocacao he is co-founder of the magazine Droga and conducts the column Italian Fologorati for Vice Magazine. With the fake name of Stefano di Trapano he is the author of “Si trasforma in un razzo missile”, recently published for Rizzoli Lizard.

Comm•e is only a year and a half old, but it is full of curiosity for the world, if somebody is willing to possess it.

John Cabot’s Communications Department launched the lecture series Digital Delights and Disturbances in Spring 2019. DDD has featured prominent personalities and important intellectuals like Lawrence Lessig, professor at Harvard University and founder of Creative Commons, net critic Geert Lovink, queer philosopher Paul B Preciado, artist Shu Lea Cheang, and the Digital Minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang. This is DDD’s first “pandemic” and online edition.

Details: Rome, Tuesday March 30^th, 6PM CET.

Please kindly send an email to RSVP and participate to: ddd@johncabot.edu