Winter break – until 2025

Winter break – until 2025
 

Dear communities, friends, supporters and interested people

We can hardly believe it ourselves… another year is over and we are now taking a winter break. From January 20th, 2025, we will be back in the office during our regular opening hours.
With all the events that have happened this year, our biggest gratitude, this year with even more heart, goes out to you. We have had an exciting year and have enjoyed every minute of discussion, sharing, learning and exchanging – thank you for joining us, still being by our side or finding your way back to us.
We would now like to give you a short review of the year.

Our digital platform The Living Archives remained rather quiet this year, as we were busy with background work: We have been working on removing barriers, tidying up and remodelling.
Thanks to the support of the LGBTI Inclusion Fund of the State Office for Equal Treatment – Against Discrimination, we were able to achieve a lot this year: We added more subtitles to our documentaries, commissioned translations into German sign language and added more content in Easy Read.
We are delighted to not only be able to further facilitate access on a content level, but also to be able to anchor and communicate this in a more sustainable and structural way. Together with you, we aim to document lots more exciting content on The Living Archives in the coming years.

#ThinkingOfCommunitysInSolidarity (#CommunitiesSolidarischDenken) is now in its fifth year as one of the thematic focal points at xart splitta. After four successful years with the project, this year we focused on the topic of ‘identities’. This is because our solidarities and alliances are built in many ways on identities that anchor historical and contemporary struggles, discourses, visions and alliances on the basis of lived realities. As identities are fundamental to our intersectional work, we often accept many of our concepts of identity unquestioningly. Now we wanted to use our mini-anniversary as an opportunity to re-centre this!

As last year’s documentation was such a success, we have once again designed a two-part publication this year. On the one hand, the result is a recipe book, because: The way to our hearts is through our stomachs and food is where we come together as a community! Here you can browse through great recipes and heartfelt stories in which some of our community members share (food) memories and relationships with you. You’ll be able to pick up the print version of our recipe book from our office in February. And as you’ll surely be dying to get your hands on it by then, the detailed digital documentation will be available on The Living Archives from January.

This year began with our kick-off panel Identity Before Politics; as in many discourses and years, it was very important for us to take the time at the beginning of the year to find out together where the current discourses are.
In the panel itself, we repeatedly realised that we need identities in order to be able to tell our stories, to address differences and similarities in our communities and ultimately to (further) develop and strengthen cross-community collaboration. But who do concepts of identity include? Which terms need to be reconsidered? Who is centred in these processes? Which stories are pushed aside within the discourses? Together with Sinthujan Varatharajah, Namarig Abkr and May Zeidani Yufanyi, we had the opportunity to create a space for reflection and discourse, which made for a great start to the year.

In terms of concepts of identity and the resumption and reflection of processes, we continued with our symposium ‘Queer of Colour Critique’.
Queer of Color Critique has been a recurring theme at xart splitta, and the symposium used various formats to re_center questions of knowledge transfer within the intersectional communities and academia in order to pursue a renewed contextualisation and challenges in the German context.
Joined by Rena Onat and Jin Haritaworn in keynote and input as well as Sailesh Naidu, Layla Zami, Okan Kubus, Sunanda Mesquita and Koray Yılmaz-Günay in the workshops and on the panel.
A note for all those who could not be there or would simply like to relive the wonderful inputs by Chandra Frank and Gayatri Gopinath, part of the final panel of the Queer of Colour Reading Circle 2021: You can find the documentary on The Living Archives!

Summer, sun, fun – finally summer arrived, Pride month was in full swing and we were in the mood for fun activities! In cooperation with GLADT, Casa Kuà and LesMigraS we organised a QTI*BIPoC Community Picnic. We were very happy to meet familiar and new people at the picnic, to play games together and to eat and barbecue together as a potluck. Thank you for being there!

One month later, it was already time for the Dyke Takeover for trans*inclusive Dykes! In our finest lumberjack outfits, we went axe throwing with you. That was so much fun! Thank you so much for being there and for the great time!

We continued into the autumn and because we loved this year’s event series around terms, we made a second one: lots and lots of letters!
Because between LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA+, queer, gay, trans, ace, various terms of allegiance are and have always been part of the communities and carry meaning, power and resistance. However, as with many identity terms, there is one (or more) discourse, disputes, perhaps even arguments. They also change: through various movements and waves and also from generation to generation and from community to community.
In cooperation with the Magnus Hirschfeld Federal Foundation, we kicked off the series of events with workshops by GodXXX Noirphiles and Jihad Yagoubi. There was also a very fun QTI*BIPoC games evening. Finally, and in cooperation with the AWO meeting centre, we invited Jin Haritaworn, Yezenia León Mezu, Paula Güllü and Judy Gummich to a panel discussion. We came together in a QTI space with many questions and, to use Jin Haritaworn’s words of the evening, re_centred this ‘90s debate’ for us.

However, (alliance) concepts and identities require reflection and effort. With this in mind, our community session on colourism and black identities took place in autumn. Together, we took the opportunity to discuss often unreflected hierarchies and exclusions within Black communities. To rethink ways and actions and critically reflect on internalised, anti-Black racism in order to disrupt divide and rule. How can we actively position ourselves against a system that increasingly excludes, devalues or disadvantages some while providing undeserved advantages to others? How can mixed-raced, light-skinned and/or brown-skinned Black people establish and strengthen (their own) identity in relation to allyship and ‘political Blackness’?

After so many great events, we ended the fifth #ThinkingOfCommunitysInSolidarity year at the end of November with our panel on Re/Envisioning Identities. Throughout our year, it came up again and again that we want to see identities as dynamic and fluid. But this means recognising that they are not static or fixed, but constantly evolving in response to new experiences, relationships and self-discovery. Rather than being limited by labels or categories assigned by society, identities have the potential to become an ongoing, self-determined process – a journey of questioning, adapting and redefining.
What happens when we dream of identities that are detached from structural discrimination? We have dared to take this step forward with you. Together with Karla Pinto, Day Eve ‘Dream’ Komet, Gitanjeli Parkash and Hyemi Jo, moderated by May Zeidani Yufanyi, we reflected on how identities can be renegotiated today and discovered their potential for a vision of the future beyond the present.

We would now like to express our heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to this project! Special thanks go to the panellists, speakers, workshop leaders and the helping hands, interpreters and communication assistants.
A big thank you to the participants of the network meetings and our cooperation partners as well as everyone else who joined us in discussions and dialogue. Together, we have created these important spaces, revitalised them and filled them with content.

We are looking forward to the coming year and the continuation of our projects. We look forward to new and old dialogue with you, to your ideas and perspectives.

With a good dose of community love, we would like to bid you farewell for this year and for now. Thank you for your support, your feedback and the support that you continue to share with us on an ongoing basis.

We wish you all relaxing days off and time to rest and take a deep breath. We hope that those who are currently going through difficult times and will continue to do so, can take a break and recharge their batteries. We hope that we can be and remain strong together.

Here’s to a new year with you. We wish you all lots of strength and all the best for the new year and the start of 2025!

With best wishes

Your xart splitta team
Juli, Taye, Turending and Thủy-Tiên