IMAGINING QUEER BANDUNG

“But what harm is in diversity, when there is unity in desire?” With this question, the Indonesian president Sukarno opened the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. Whilst being known as one of the earliest global alliances of people of color in non-alignment politics, these political acteurs represented only the interests of their own nation-states, at the cost of oppressing marginal queer and indigenous groups. Hence the absence of these perspectives in the linear and heteronormative historical narrative of anti-colonial struggles. Imagining Queer Bandung aims to draw a bridge between this “unity in desire” and LGBTQ+ social activism, decolonial knowledge, and cinematic imagination. How can we imagine alternative approaches in which queer bodies – across Asian, African, and Caribbean contexts – participate in, produce and reclaim these larger discourses for themselves, their communities, and their liberation, as neither national nor sexual objects?

Funded by Fonds Soziokultur and The European Solidarity Corps in cooperation with  ‘Queer’ Asia in Germany

Sarnt Utamachote (ษาณฑ์อุตมโชติ) is a Southeast Asian nonbinary filmmaker and curator based in Berlin. They are a co-founder of the artist collective un.thai.tled and curated film events and exhibitions regarding postcolonial histories, Southeast Asian diaspora and activism. Currently they work as a selection committee member for Xposed Queer Film Festival Berlin and Short Film Festival Hamburg.

Popo Fan is a Berlin-based Chinese diaspora filmmaker, curator and writer. His films include queer activism documentaries and scripted, sex-positive shorts. For more than a decade, he has organized the Beijing Queer Film Festival and founded the Queer University Video Training Camp in China.

Ragil Huda is an organizer, independent curator, and graduate student at the Asien-Afrika Institut, Universität Hamburg. He co-founded QTIBIPOC Hamburg and is also one of the organizing committees of the international platform and network called Queer' Asia in Berlin. His community engagement and academic work specifically center on queerness, intersectionality, community building, critical pedagogy, and the social-political realities of marginalized communities through various methodologies and collaborative curatorial practices.