Fri 27 June 2025
Beursschouwburg — Gouden Zaal — 20:00
Before queerness had a name in Arabic, it had stories, rituals, and bodies in motion.
‘Our Queer Future is a Past Tense اجساد من علق’ by Ahmad Bábá is a promenade performance that reimagines queer identity through a post-migration Arab* lens. Drawing on erased histories and classical texts, it conjures a sensorial space where queer Arab* bodies—made of memory, language, and resistance—refuse colonial time.
In ‘La Revisión’, Sergio R. Suárez x La Basal deconstruct flamenco as a site of rupture and reclamation. The body, stripped of neutrality, becomes an instrument of rage, intimacy, and radical empathy.
Together, these works resist fixed identities and imagine queerness as multiplicity in motion.
Ahmad Bábá
Our queer Future is a past tense اجساد من علق — Germany/Lebanon — 30''
It is an installation performance in a form of a promenade, based on a post migration perspective on Queerness in relation to Arab* Identity(s). As a term, Queerness does not exist in Arabic. However, it does and did exist as a practice, one that goes back further than the global queerness; that Western hegemony imposed on the globe. The language of queerness becomes hegemonic through erasing identities that existed before it and subsuming/substituting vast and complex communities, histories, and languages across the globe with a monolithic, generalizing Western model of understanding and approaching sexual and gender diversity. Ahmad BáBá will take the audience through a journey between different temporal and spatial dimensions of “queer” existence. : an invisible past, incorporating linguistic, social, cultural, and religious elements on erotic, sexual and “non-normative” discourses from classical Arab* manuscripts. Into a distorted present that challenge the hegemony of Western narratives about Arabo-Islamic sexual and gender identities, Towards imagining a utopic future that holds more questions than offer answers. “Ilk علق” is an attempt to engage with these questions! It is an investigation into how queerness has become a form of colonialism, erasing and homogenizing many identities and ways of being that do not necessarily fit under it as an umbrella term, but are nonetheless drawn to it due to the lack of taxonomies and terms that signify and encompass collective queer existences in their own contexts.
Sergio R.Suárez x La Basal
La Revisión (The Review) — Spain — 25''
I move from the need to break away from normativity, to drag the hegemonic towards the margins. Because it is time to collectivize in our pain and in our rage, to stop questioning our identities and start questioning what surrounds us; to use the body convincingly as a tool of expression, and not just of execution; to forget neutrality and operate from empathy; to abandon the idea of equality and visualize a huge embrace of our differences, which, however, do not become a reason for discrimination. That’s why I contemplate myself. That’s why I question myself. That’s why, ‘La Revisión’ (The Review).
