constellations

Constellations (est. 2023) is a biannual Festival and Berlin-wide search for traces that revisits disappeared and displaced sites of queer urban culture: with performances, live music, dance, lectures, urban explorations and collective listenings. Some of these places represent experimental forms of housing whose residents created safer spaces and thus models for current housing models; informal appropriations of public spaces as “tea-rooms” and cruising grounds; bars, clubs and event series established by groups of trans* and queer people of color and that were crucial to freely express indivual’s identities; meeting points and sites of queer community that fell victim to the neoliberal logic of exploitation, gentrification and the pandemic; and of course spaces that stand for protest and the struggle for equality and from where the voices that fought for social tolerance also reverberate beyond the city limits.
 Oral histories and audio portraits by and with contemporary witnesses bring the disappeared back to life. Performers and artists respond artistically to those forgotten places and overlay memory with new constellations of queer spatial practice.

Who tells which theirstory(s) to whom is also a question of (political) power and hegemony. Some stories are deliberately not told, others are destroyed, or those who could tell them are not offered a platform. Non-normative histories are therefore rarely part of mainstream memory culture: this is also true for queer history, its protagonists and places. 

Along with the Constellations events and audio portraits, this website is a growing archive that collects oral histories and stories about queer spaces and institutions that no longer exist but whose legacies remain very much alive.

Constellations is a project by POLIGONAL and funded by Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis.