Kolbrún Inga Söring

Kolbrún Inga Söring is a genderqueer artist working in Gothenburg whose work spans several areas of artistic expression from performance, video work and site-specific installation to community cultivation and cultural production.

Sam Message

Sam (they/them) is an artist and activist working with the spatial & the relational to explore connections between people. As a drag-performer they put their bizarre, playful and punk-like aesthetic to explore the surreal, the subversive and the political. They are both a researcher of queering practice and theory and a curator specialising in queer and feminist histories and themes. Other work includes inclusion, accessibility and engagement consultation, education and evaluation.

What is CULT?
CULT is our drag night where drag creatures, cretins and performers get on stage to scream, shout and let it all hang out. CULT is radical, political, outrageous and entertaining. Prepare yourselves.

Why do we need CULT?

Drag As A Medium
Drag is a powerful medium. It is electrifying, engaging and gets an audience screaming and shouting. Done right, its a loud and proud expression of queer and trans joy which reaches acrross the broad spectrum of the LGBTQ+ community. 

Drawing on drag’s long history of subversion and boundary crossing, we subscribe to the school of thought that drag should be funny and playful, outrageous and loud but also fiercely political and deeply empowering. With the support of tools developed by Status Queer, initations uses the free-school format to encourage peer-to-peer learning to get us to explore ourselves personally and politically. Together we work to sharpen our perspectives, bring into being our political voice and practice shouting it out at the top of our lungs.

A Drag Family
With every round of Initiations we welcome more members to our CULT. The end goal is that the community will grow into a sustainable pool of performers, large enough to hold regular drag nights with diverse themes and packed with different styles and identities.

Cult of Consumption
Our first CULT night was a roaring success. We got messy, we got naughty, we laughed and we screamed. Packed to the rafters, Kolgruvan was vibrating with radical queer and trans joy. This was the first, and after that excpeirence it certainly won’t be the last.

Since then the invites have come rolling in, so keep your eyes peeled for this CULT at an altar near you soon!

More to Come
With 2 more rounds of Initiations coming this autumn there’s plenty more CULT action to get in on. Hold tight, we’ve got much more up our billowing sequin-covered sleeves.

What is Initiations?

Initiations is a drag free-school where participants meet over a number of weeks to develop their first drag performance, from their persona to their look, their concept to their performance. Each round has a different theme which participants make their performances to. Initations seeks to foster the growth of a radical, political, diverse, captivating and entertaining drag scene here in gothenburg.

At the end of the free-school participants are initiated into our drag family and debut their performances in our drag night CULT. 

Why do we need Initiations?

Drag As A Medium
Drag is a powerful medium. It is electrifying, engaging and gets an audience screaming and shouting. Done right, its a loud and proud expression of queer and trans joy which reaches acrross the broad spectrum of the LGBTQ+ community. 

Drawing on drag’s long history of subversion and boundary crossing, we subscribe to the school of thought that drag should be funny and playful, outrageous and loud but also fiercely political and deeply empowering. With the support of tools developed by Status Queer, initations uses the free-school format to encourage peer-to-peer learning to get us to explore ourselves personally and politically. Together we work to sharpen our perspectives, bring into being our political voice and practice shouting it out at the top of our lungs.

Empowering New Artistic Voices
Initiations seeks to empower a new generation of artistic voices to take to the stage and get their message out with the eyes and the ears of the community on them. As with all our work, initiations prioritises the inclusion of those most marginalised in our community – which of course also intersects with those who have had least access to traditional pathways into the world of art and culture. Read more about our accessibility and inclusion strategies here.

Initiations: Consumption
In the first round of initiations we explored consumption – consumption of food, consumption of sex, consumption of the self, consumption of the very soil we live on. Check out our gallery for a glimpse of the behind the scenes, and our page on CULT for the fruits of our labour.

Initiations rounds 2 & 3
Due to such high demand and our thirst for a radical, raging drag scene in Gothenburg, rounds 2 and 3 of initiations are coming your way for autumn 2022. Keep your eyes peeled for our open call.

What is Secret Sound Gardens?

This workshop series with sound artist Isabel Taube(she/they) is centred around designing soundscapes. In the workshops participants have the chance to explore storytelling and create new worlds through the medium of sound.

Why do we need Secret Sound Gardens?

With a pair of headphones, a soundscape can be a soothing slice of a queer/trans utopia wherever you need it to be. Through this series, we seek to continue empowering new artistic agents from our community’s most marginalised members. With a variety of free to use in-browser software options and mobile apps, digital sound design has never been more accessible – and of course for those who can’t afford it, we supply all the materials necessary.

Right now Secret Sound Gardens is going through a transformation, watch this space for more news soon!

Workshop 1

This is an introductory workshop for anyone who has ever wanted to try out music software and is raring to add to their self-expression toolbox and those who have already dipped their toes into sound’s soothing waters. The workshop was a space for participants to explore queer utopia’s through sound and experiment in a relaxed and supportive setting.

What is This is the Queer Space?

TITQS is a Gothenburg based platform for LGBTQ+ culture for and by LGBTQ+ people. It’s the glue that holds our newly forming community together, providing valuable safer social spaces. Events include everything from mouthwatering thumping bass to chill nights in to queer company for cultural celebrations.

TITQS is here, its queer and thats true throughout the whole goddamn year.

The platform is a Facilitated Open Space. This means that if you come with a vision and a desire to make something happen, TITQS can give you the tools and the means for you to make that vision a reality. 

Contact us now if you want to organise something through This is the Queer Space! We want to make spaces for all kinds of people and all kinds of culture so fire off your ideas, we’re all ears!

TITQS is also a support structure for Status Queer and other LGBTQ+ creators in and around Gothenburg. Get in contact if there’s a project you want support with!

Why do we need This is the Queer Space?

Gothenburg has an acute lack of spaces for LGBTQ+ people. Many of us have had terrible experiences in those very few spaces that exist. We need a space for us, by us, where we can shut out the transphobic, queerphobic and all the other bad phobics and isms outside the walls of our queer castle.

Pride comes around once a year, but TITQS is here to get us through the long dark Swedish winters together. It is here to bring us together as a community and cement all the community building we do in our social practice as artist duo Status Queer.

NON
NON is Gothenburg’s primary gender devour party. Working alongside Ballroom Exchange, NON brings underground queer culture into the city’s more established venues. In doing so, NON puts LGBTQ+ artists, performers and designers (aspiring and established) in the spotlight to get the love they deserve.

SJUKT
SJUKT is a place of queer and trans euphoria. A safe haven where we let loose and get dressed up to the absolute nines. Every SJUKT has a theme and oh boy does our community know how to kill a look. Club Kids, drag artists and dancers abound, SJUKT is the space we all need to shake off all the shit of the cis-het world outside. Quite simply, it’s our space.

QUEER OPEN SPACE
Much like the work we do as artists, This is the Queer Space seeks to empower new voices. Those can be artistic voices, political voices, community voices etc. 

That’s why we draw on the Open Space concept: the idea that it is the community itself that decides how to use the space. While in the future we are working towards everyone being able to freely engage with this Open Space, right now there are many intersections in our community who often don’t feel like they have the access to projects like this. Read more about our position on that here. That’s why TITQS is a Facilitated Open Space. That means TITQS is there to help you gain the tools to realise your own ideas. Those ideas could be an art project, a workshop, a clothes swap, a watch party, a board game night, a dance session or just a hang out to name just a couple ideas – it can be whatever you want it to be!

TITQS is not just a platform, but also a support structure helping new LGBTQ+ artists, cultural producers, activists and community builders to burst into bloom.

If you have an idea for TITQS then don’t hesitate to get in touch!

What is We Were There?

In this workshop series we imagine what Gothenburg’s museums might look like if the stories of nonnormative people, of marginalised and oppressed peoples, of border-crossers and of gender defiers were as representated as the powerful favoured by the patriarchy (read: white, rich, upperclass, cis-het, male, able-bodied).

Why do we need We Were There?

LGBTQ+ is a modern phenomenon — but boundary-crossers, norm-breakers and diversity in sexual orientation & gender identity have been recorded throughout written history and across the globe.

Our heritage is constantly being written and rewritten. It affects how we think about who we are and where we come from. But not all stories in our heritage were born equal. What survives has been filtered by the ableism, ageism, classism, queerphobia, racism, sexism and transphobia, which continue to plague our soceity today. Quite simply, our stories are often hidden, lost or never even recorded in the first place.

But we were there. In this workshop series we are asking: what would Gothenburg’s museums look like if our stories were as proudly present as those of normative and powerful people? In the workshops, participants explore alternative narratives and fabricated historical artefacts to play, experiment and get in touch with both non-normative lives in Gothenburg and their own experiences of the city. 

We’re collaborating with a number of Gothenburg’s museums on this project, of which we can announce Göteborgs Konstmuseum and Göteborgs Stadsmuseum as hosting 2 of our workshops this autumn. Watch this space for more soon.

Does your institution need a queer intervention? Our ears are open, get in touch with us now!

Göteborgs Stadsmuseum
In this workshop, participants will make fake historical objects that will evidence the lives of non-normative people. Drawing on the museum’s on-display collection, participants will explore both their lives as non-normative Gothenburgers and the real and hidden queer histories that surround them.

Göteborgs Konstmuseum
Here participants will write queer and trans alternate histories to works in the museum. Participants will both draw on the hidden queer histories of works in the museum’s collection and use narrative and writing as a way to explore a queer future through an imagined past. The works will then be turned into a publicly available audioguide.

What is Increasing Inclusion?

This programme encompasses a variety of training sessions, workshops and tools we use to help organisations and individuals become more welcoming and inclusive to marginalised people from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum. To do so, we draw on our scholarly work, our Gothenburg-specific research and a variety of local and international collaborations to put together a series of different inclusion tools. We know that everyone needs to do their bit, that’s why our diversity and inclusion work is designed to be as accessible and practically applicable as possible. 

Our philosophy is rooted in a deep and textured intersectional analysis, you can read more about our own approach to diversity and inclusion here.

Our goal is to give these tools to organisations, working groups and individuals seeking to build more inclusive working, studying and social environments – so please don’t hesitate to get in touch to see how we can help you be more inclusive.

For professional engagements, our fee is available on request.

Why do you need our Diversity & Inclusion Programme?

We all have a role to play in making this world more welcoming and inclusive to all different intersections under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, so please get in touch to see how we can help you change your workplace or study environment.

We tailor our work to your specific needs, so whatever your situation we can design a programme with maximum lasting impact.

What is MOTGIFTET?

MOTGIFTET (the antidote) is a space we make in Gothenburg to come together as a community, unwind, tool-up and heal. This workshop series serves up local and international talent from across a variety of different artistic and cultural disciplines to get us exploring ourselves and each other. 

The series seeks to empower new creators and artists-to-be. We do this both by introducing participants to new mediums and by acting as a platform where artists and knowledge holders of all different levels of experience can have the chance to develop and lead their own workshops.

MOTGIFTET also gives us a framework to continue developing our collaborations with our international partners from The Queer Agenda.

Why do we need MOTGIFTET?

We live in a racist, ableist, agist, queerphobic, transphobic and all-the-other-terrible-ists-and-phobics world. We need MOTGIFTET to exchange knowledges and skills, and to give space for us to celebrate ourselves and enjoy each other. MOTGIFTET builds on the work we started in Sparkplug 1.0 by providing the framework and the glue needed to keep sticking us together as a community.

MOTGIFTET #1: Club Kids Then and Now Screening
Drawing on the long history of queer boudary crossers and gender benders, Sam Message put together a snap shot of the Club Kid culture with a series of long and short films. This workshop was produced in collaboration with This is the Queer Space in preperation for the launch of their party SJUKT where attendees are encouraged to get wild with their aesthetics.

MOTGIFTET #2: Club Kid Drink & Draw
In this playful workshop, Sam Message and Kolbrún Inga Söring broke down the ‘I can’t draw’ narrative with a variety of exciting and experimental drawing techniques. Featuring 3 stunning club kid models). Participants played with tools like ‘edward-charcoal-hands’ and huge bendy foam rods to capture the naugthy club kid aesthetic.
 

MOTGIFTET #3: Teaching To Transgress Toolbox
For this workshop Sam Message and Kolbrún Inga Söring created a workshop with the material produced by the TTTT working group ‘Who’s in the classroom?’. The workshop focused on the many aspects of the Pronoun go-round and focused on three main elements, ice breakers, name and pronoun and accessibility. The main focus was to explore more intersectional and inclusive educational and working environments and give participants the tools to apply them to their own contexts. 

MOTGIFTET #4: Feminist Culture House
This workshop explored collaborations and agreement writing in the arts and cultural field. Peer support, collective sharing, and community building are central elements of Feminist Culture House’s practice, so this workshop was conversational—together, we practiced thinking about our needs and created small zines about them. Through their guidance and experience of feminist practice in approaching collaborations, they introduced tools for welcoming trans artists and arts workers into safe collaborative relationships. 

MOTGIFTET #5: Daniel Mariblanca
Taking the artistic process from 71BODIES as a starting point, this workshop got us engaging with each other by exploring self boundaries and dancing together through improvisational tasks all while working through physical and mental challenges. Through Daniel’s guidance, we focused on searching for personal and unique dance qualities with every participant. 

Most of all, we had fun, experimented with the body and expanded our contact with others.

What is Sparkplug?

Sparkplug is a festival of LGBTQ+ delights designed to bring together the most marginalised groups under the LGBTQ+. 

For Sparkplug 1.0 we used large scale installation and jam packed week of exciting programming to kickstart the growth of a new, more inclusive, more supportive LGBTQ+ community here in Gothenburg.

Sparkplug 2.0 is in the pipeline, so hold tight Helsinki, you’re in our sights…

Why do we need Sparkplug?

Our community is fractured and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people has been incredibly uneven.

We need a community so we can support each other and build a better path forward together, but to do this we need to harmonise. Harmonising doesn’t mean becoming the same, it means finding a way to all sing our own tune whilst resonating with others. It means that together we can create something more than just the sum of our parts.

As the starting point for a new harmonisation, Sparkplug 1.0 used two key types of tools to get this music flowing: relational ones and spatial ones. Where the spatial is all about sensory experiences like colour, form, texture and lighting, the relational is all about connecting with people in different ways. 

This is part of a methodology we’ve developed called Community Cultivation. To give you a quick crash course, we’re using Community Cultivation’s spatial and relational tools to bring together new groups of people from different marginalised groups under the LGBTQ+ umbrella and get them to interact with each other. We use this methodology to guide different kinds of interactions with the ultimate goal of fostering new relationships and, in turn, lay the foundations for a more intersectionality diverse LGBTQ+ community.

The Spatial

We had two tasks with the spatial:

1. To create an environment which encouraged play and upset the rules. 

OUR SPACE OUR RULES
Walking into the gallery, you were immediately confronted with a pulsating, mouthwatering interruption to the sleek yeet bland navy, beige and black Scandinavian world outside. Just as we as a community break with normative life we made our space to break with normative aesthetics.

Sparkplug 1.0’s captivating sensory experience set the stage to move away from the cis-het norms that dominate our social world. At the same time though, being in such an alien space also had us feeling a little alien. If this was going to be the springboard for a new community, for a new home, we first needed to claim this space for ourselves.

Throughout the festival, workshops continually added to the space. We hung up our work, painted directly on the walls and furniture, created freestanding sculptures and left our traces as we pleased. Through our work and our play we claimed ownership over this space together. This built a special connection between us and the space  – in turn this allowed the space to become a medium through which we could connect to those we hadn’t directly worked with.

THE SPACE THAT HUGGED
While the first space was a place to get wet and wild, we also needed somewhere to collect ourselves, connect with ourselves and savour a slice of cooling calm.

At the back of the project space lay a shrouded entrance. Through this entrance came an outstretched peace offering: a hand holding a plant-cutting. In Gothenburg this plant is known as the ‘lesbisk nässla’ or ‘lesbian nettle’. The origin of the name is said to come from how easy it is to take cuttings from it. As the folklore goes, once one lesbian gets one, it spreads like wildfire through their circle. Textile artist Esse McChesney based their work for the Project Space on this ol’ queer Gothenburg tale, taking the ‘lesbian nettle’ as a symbol for our community’s sharing and caring: queer love, if you will!

Plunging into this entrance took you to the source of our space’s otherness – the portal. The Portal Room was designed to expand the space’s versatility. 

The Portal Rooms’ cool throbbing lights, encapsulating fabrics and dampened sound created a stark contrast to the bustling vibrant room lying just beyond the entrance. 

Throughout the week we used this space for reflection, and to take those quieter moments where we needed to get vulnerable with each other. With its completely different feeling to the Project Space, the portal room opened up a whole new set of possibilities for the kinds of relational work we could do with each other.

Sparkplug 1.0 was a space between spaces. It was a space between the world of ablist, racist, ageist, sexist, classist, cis-het bullshit outside and the queer utopia lying somewhere out of reach, beyond the portal. Sparkplug 1.0 sought to upset these overpowering systems; and even if we couldn’t override them completely, our two space’s gave us room to at least start that process.

2. To create a space which could host all of our relational work. 

This is where the Swiss Army Space comes in: we needed a space to host everything from drag workshops to mural painting, embroidery to vogue, film screenings to karaoke, social space to open space. Furniture we built to make this happen included folding benches and tables that turned into room dividers.

Our furniture also needed to work as tools in our unscripted relation work. The flowing organic shape of our benches were made to be the heart of the room, where people naturally would collect. It became a place where people could meet in smaller groups, whilst also facilitating the mixing of these groups to make broader conversations. With the help of all our structured relational work, this became a space where relative strangers came together to share intimate experiences of being LGBTQ+ in Gothenburg.

The Relational

Once we had claimed ownership over the space together, the stage was set to build new relationships in our fractured community. Together, the workshopping and the spatial work paved the way for the crucial next step: getting into the nitty-gritty. We put on a buffet of different events from high energy – think a room full of hyped up queers and trans people chanting ‘gay power’ over and over again, an activity which deffinately did not upset the neighbours… thanks Speech Karaoke – down to careful contemplation. 

This all fostered a lot of discussions – joyful ones, confronting ones, caring ones, difficult ones – and a lot of listening – listening to dreams, to frustration, to demands, to consolations, to play. 

We had spontaneous discussions, structured discussions and prompted discussions. To spark these conversations, and to guide them, we used a variety of starting points from following scripts and our Together Tools (tools you can only use in collaboration with others) to film screenings and panel & round-table discussions. 

These discussions helped us understand the different struggles, challenges and joys that we face across our incredibly varied community here in Gothenburg. 

MAKING TOGETHER
Whether it was preaching impassioned speeches or sissying our swaying hips, embroidering rainy umbrellas or jumbling together non-binary characters, painting walls or painting faces, we did a lot of making together! Check out the gallery tab to get a taste of the action.

Our workshops were designed by and for people who belong to our 5 priority LGBTQ+ groups – racialised people, working class/precarious people, people with dsaibilities, elders and binary & nonbinary trans people. You can read more about our approach to accessibility and inclusion here.

Throughout the festival, we drew on the strengths of local talent and our international partners from The Queer Agenda to put on a deliciously varied spread of workshops to tantalise people of different tastes – we wanted to make sure there was at least 1 thing that got people’s juices flowing! 

COMMUNITY
We built a space that broke with the norms outside its walls. Then we helped our community claim it for their own. In doing so, those that took part built a special relationship with both the space and each other. This made people feel at home and created fertile ground for new relations to sprout.

During this time we also made room for ‘open space’ – giving the chance for those in the community to turn up and do what they wanted with the space. From impromptu lip sync competitions to drawing to runway presentation on the street outside we used the space how we wanted to. 

So, did it work?

Since Sparkplug 1.0 we’ve seen the seeds we planted burst out of the ground. First they were just small shoots, but with our continued nurturing and fertilising with the help of all our fabulous collaborators we’ve seen these plants grow into sturdy young saplings. Read more about our artistic endevours, and the social spaces our siblings at This is the Queer Space to find out more!

Where there is plenty of work still to go, we are well on our way to the sustainable, inclusive and diverse LGBTQ+ community we dream of. Onwards and upwards Gothenburg!

What is The Queer Agenda?

The Queer Agenda is a network of LGBTQ+ artists, cultural producers and community builders from across the Nordic and Baltic regions. Our fields vary from film making to illustration, intersectional organising to dance and more! 

In our network we share knowledges across our different practices and Nordic/Baltic cultural contexts.

Why do we need The Queer Agenda?

As LGBTQ+ cultural producers, community builders and individuals we face lots of different and specific challenges. These challenges vary enormously depending on who we are, where we come from and in what situation we are in. In the face of these challenges we have learnt to be resilient and innovative in order to not just survive but to thrive. In our work as a network we seek to learn from each other’s success and mistakes. 

We also work to strengthen the ties between marginalised LGBTQ+ people from around the Nordic/Baltic region to open up new opportunities for collaboration and cross-polination.

Round 1

In the first round of The Queer Agenda, we explored our utpoic visions and dreams for the future by drawing on our different experiences and knowledges from the past. Through a series of workshops we tackled issues facing us as LGBTQ+ organisers and artists and explored our desires for utopian queer spaces and relations. 

Sparkplug 1.0

We drew directly on this process for our contribution to installation for Sparkplug 1.0 and also developed 2 artist’s briefs – one for a local Gothenburg-based artist and one for an international partner organisation to respond to for the festival. The first was a spatial brief which Esse McChesney responded to and the other was a relational brief, assigned to Feminist Culture House. 

All members of the network were invited to contribute a progamme point during the festival, check out more about the exciting programme we put together here!

Round 2

Right now we are recruiting for round 2 of The Queer Agenda, so if you are or know an artist, cultural producer or community builder working within the LGBTQ+ community please get in touch here. 

Our Priority Groups

Our inclusion strategy recognises that many marginalised LGBTQ+ people face barriers in accessing traditional pathways to the world of art and culture. That’s why we work to include voices which are excluded by the art world’s systems of ‘professionalisation’, especially those from our priority groups. So whether or not you consider yourself a professional artist, we still want to hear from you. Your knowledge is especially valuable, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch here.