Anarchiving Translatinx memories

The Somatic Laboratory project – Trans*latinx memories consist of movement and body practice sessions throughout the second semester of 2022 and the first semester of 2023, in which Trans and Queer Latinx groups meet with art practitioners and researchers. With this project Papaya Kuir wants to democratize learning and knowledge production processes, creating support networks and cross-pollination between academic, artistic spaces and grassroots communities that don’t have access to care and healing spaces and technologies. 

With the urgency of creating spaces for collective care through art and the need to reclaim the relationship to our bodies in our own terms, we invite our community to a somatic laboratory experience. Here we will tune in with our bodies to activate, listen, regenerate, scream, breathe, (re)imagine and shake traumatic memories stuck in our bodies that are significantly affecting our mental and spiritual health. 

The purpose of this project is to create space to share, feel, process, integrate, transform and politicize memories of displacement, migration and transition that we as trans and queer latinx refugees/migrants/asylum seekers have to deal with. 

The participants are invited to co-create a space to claim and enhance the known and unknown of our bodies based on practices of liberation, trust, care and affective resistance. Towards the reappropriation of experiences of healing and care, outside the hetero-cis-neoliberal-colonial system.

As part of the process we collected notes, diagrams, visual traces and written stories, evoked during the somatic sessions to create a fanzine. The fanzine will be a decolonial archive of these experiences and a way to share them with the larger trans and queer communities we are part of.  

Papaya Kuir is a lesbotransfeminist collective of migrants and refugees from Latin America and the spanish-speaking Caribbean based in The Netherlands. As a collective we have three pillars of work: we participate in anti-racist and anti-patriarchal panel discussions denouncing the problems that threatens our communities; we organize an emergency network for people who need support in their transit processes -migratory, gender or sexual- and we create cultural and artistic projects such as queer cabarets, workshops and parties to generate a sense of belonging and encourage processes of social transformation in our community.

This project is supported by DAS Research Funds, Platform D&I ATD and Papaya Kuir Collective.