Wormholes, Time-warps, and Unruly Tides: On queer time and space

“You live in a superposition of the you of the past and the you of the future. According to the laws of time travel, the two yous should not meet. But you are not a run-of-the-mill time traveller. As a trans time traveller, you live through all times at once [...]"—Senka and Keö, Nightly Manifesto

Reading Rhythms Club is an experimental reading group that opens up texts as spaces for encounter and collective learning. It brings people together around shared urgencies, stimulates critical thinking, and builds community. Making use of reading methods, it aims to understand different facets of political, social, and economic violence and sketch strategies of resistance. Every session is organised with an invited conspirator in a different location that sets the scene and enriches the texts. Reading Rhythms Club is organised by Julia Wilhelm and Senka Milutinović.

This session:
The experience of growing up queer often contradicts linear notions of how we are expected to age, of the milestones we are supposed to reach. Similarly unmoored from the straight flow of time are bodies affected by trauma who experience temporal flashbacks. To give rhythm to the relentless flow of capital, Capitalism constructed the linear time of growth and productivity, erasing alternative conceptions of and relations to time.

We invite you to this experimental reading session on November 3rd from 14.00 to 16.30 at Roodkapje, hosted by the Hamburger Community. We will be travelling in between fictional and factual worlds, opening up cracks and fissures in normative conceptions of time imposed on our bodies. (Out of these cracks emerge strange creatures: ghosts, Schroedinger’s cats, trans time travellers.) The spatial reading choreography invites you to choose your own adventure through snippets of text that deal with how growing up queer turns ageing upside-down, how capitalist modernity imposes standardised time, and how experiences of trauma and neurodivergence produce alternative temporalities. Expect playful reading prompts, collective reflection, and literary jumps and jolts on this journey through time.

---------

Roodkapje’s Hamburger Community is a residency program, an interdisciplinary art laboratory for collaborative practice and direct interaction between artists and audience. The trajectory’s main focus is playfulness and creating together. Current residents are Irene Cassarini (aka Guenter Råler), Julia Wilhelm, M.C. Julie Yu, Repelsteeltje and Tisa World.