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Queering the City of Literature

August 26, 2022 @ 20:00 22:00

Links: Nicole Römer | Midden: Steff Geelen | Rechts: Alara Adilow

Queering the City of Literature (QtCoL) is a Savannah Bay project that sits at the intersection of our areas of specialization: literature, gender diversity and sexual diversity.

The project is inspired by the literary flâneur: the figure who walks around seeing and being seen and comes to life on the streets of a city. In QTCoL we learn to see the familiar city with different eyes through queer literary texts. Through this literary strolling, we learn to see the city in a new way.

On Friday, August 26, Steff Geelen, Nicole Römer will read their text about being queer in the city at Villa Concordia. Afterwards we will go into the city with the authors, who will spread fragments of their stories through the neighborhood. Entry is at 19:30.

Alara Adilow

Alara Adilow (1988) is a poet and author of Somali descent, living in Amsterdam. She studies law part-time at the Open University and follows the writing course at the Schrijversvakschool Amsterdam with study direction prose. She lived for ten years in the United Kingdom, Leicester, studying hip-hop production and vocalist. She performed on stages in the Netherlands and Germany and Flanders. In 2019 she made it to the finals of NK Poetry Slam and in 2020 she was part of the NOORDWOORD poetry talent trajectory and currently she is participating in the multi-year Building a Bridge project, where she will work with poets from Bremen on a literary performance. Alara was selected For the Public in Residence for the queer and transgender community at Museum Arnhem in 2022. She was a guest writer at nY magazine in 2021, where she received guidance to begin work on her novella Needle of the Sun. Alara has published poetry in DB Warande, De Gids, Sample Kanon, De Revisor, Tirade, Poëziekrant, and on Oote-oote, DIG, and De Optimist. She is currently working on her debut collection Myths and Traffic Lights, which will be published by Prometheus Publishers. Besides writing she is also a podcast maker, for her podcast Postcolonialism and Archives she invites poets and writers to interact with an archive related to (post) colonialism.

Nicole Römer
Nicole Römer (she/they/they) is a writer, speaker, and coordinator at Neighborhood Feminists, an intersectional feminist collective in Amsterdam Southeast that works against menstrual poverty in Amsterdam. Hen is a columnist for Savannah Bay’s Radio Bay program, a board member at Black Pride NL, and a freelance D&I consultant. She is currently working on her first book, a memoir.

Steff Geelen

Steff Geelen (1995) is a writer, theater maker and performer with a background in sociology. In their work they combine different disciplines such as theater/performance, installation art, audiovisual elements and language. Important themes in their work are metamorphosis, mythology, desire, loss of control and displacement. Their main characters are often misfits looking for a place to land, precisely because they cannot settle in daily reality. They seek refuge in intermediate worlds, places where rules and norms are ambiguous, the boundaries between inside and outside blurred.  Steff is coach and maker at Poetry Circle Nowhere and a regular maker at Likeminds. In 2020 she and fourteen other (international) artists were selected for the 3Package Deal, a talent development grant from the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts. Hen writes poetry, prose and essays and has performed at festivals such as Over Het IJ, Brainwash, What You See and Amsterdam Fringe. Steff is in a development trajectory at Wintertuin. 

Practical information

19:30 Doors open
20:00 Start program
20:45 A walk through the neighbourhood Ondiep
21:30 borrel (drinks)
22:00 End

Villa Concordia

Concordiastraat 67A
Utrecht, Utrecht 3551 EM Nederland
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