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Hi Queer! Welcome to the OoQA wiki.

The Office of Queer Affairs (OoQA) is a parasitic, fluid, mutating collective body involved with the Van Abbemuseum that embeds and entangles the perspectives of Eindhoven's queer community into the museum's curatorial practices, public programming and educational activities. In our group, we have members, ancestors, allies, lovers and frenemies, all living inside and outside of Eindhoven, each with their own desires, sensibilities and socio-political activisms. The group is always loosely weaved together, sometimes gathering closer together to run projects and other times sprawling apart to grow in their separate directions.

Our relationship with the museum has always been more of a situationship.

We also consider oursleves the naughty youngest child of the museum being born around eight years ago  in the wet and windy, desolate land of Eindhoven. And through our community we have found a place to live out our queer adolescence where we plot the hijack of the toilets, flirt with the paintings and make out with Angela Davis on the carpet of the womens room.

We believe the office to be a communal body where we sometimes only have our hands and feet but we are happy with the incomplete, so its okay. There's always room for a dramatic exit or a slip in because we will ever be in flux and our ancestors are only a phone call away.

We're always messy, non-hierarchical, attentive and caring. We have non-definitions for membership, allyship and group ancestry. Our group is incomplete, always in transition and often taking breaks.

Conception

Before the OoQA there was the beginning. In the beginning there was the creator, Olle Lundin grauated from Design Academy in 2016 and as part of that graduation he created a project. Queering the Collection was a collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum that questioned not only how we interact with the museum, but also the why of the status quo of behaviors and structures that seem so concrete and so rigid at times. The Van Abbemuseum quickly realised that these gays were onto something.

At the same time the Van Abbemuseum was launching itself as a self described "constituent museum" and they engaged Olle as a liason with the "consitutencies" - groups of people who were to engage with the museum in varying capacities. Olle found Claire and they formed a bookclub within the walls of museum. Karl, Noam and Tadhg quickly followed and brought a kinetic kinship to the group. Together with the bookclub the newly formed Queer Constituency became the new "enfant terrible" of the museum and began stomping around the exhibition halls in full toddler glory.

As the newly annoited and self-proclaimed "naughty youngest child" of the museum we embodied a playfullness through our practice but demanded respect and took up space in the museum. We flexed our legs and got to work planning events through which we could grow our community and interrogate the practices of the museum. We were joined by Malou who had a profound impact on the group as a creative force and playful facilitator of community building. They spearheaded the Museum Drag Ups. At this moment we were considered volunteers and did not recieve renumeration for our work beyond a volunteer fee. We felt our contributions were worth more.

*By calling ourselves the child, and calling the museum the mother, we don't intend to reproduce the idea of motherhood as in the cis-hetero nuclear family

Transition

Never emerging from of our rebellious phase, the office has made some great changes inside and outside our body. We once had this little argument with Mother Van Abbe* about our value in the museum. They became a frenemie for a while. A moment of frustration, accountability and eventual funding brought about our early transition. Some may have previously known the Office as the Queer Constituency, when it was more closely associated with the its mother's agenda. This had to change, as there was a misalignement of agendas. We negotiated our terms and moved forward as the Office of Queer Affairs.

Against the background of the new collection presentation we endevoured to make a visible and lasting impact on the museum. Through a series of bookclubs we developed the idea of interacting with the artworks in a more loving and sexy way. Thus, the Love Letters project was formed. We invited new membership in the form of Michelle; a writer and student with a fiery voice and a talent for writing. This was a tough time for the group and our relationships were tested as we scrambled to pull the project together and maintain our core values of respect and understanding.

We got really good at making love to artworks that we were invited to share our methods at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Through braiding and writing and dragging we brought a little queer spice to Venice and exchanged recipies with the queer community existing there.

Not long after we entered our more dreamy, reflective stage of incomplete resititution in practice which gave way to our decision to document and archive our growth through the years to be shared with the outside world.

Entry on tools/technologies?

We have utilized various tools, skills, technologies for our activities in and around the museum. These often originate from our experiences outside the office, for example, Malou offering their drag/make-up skills as an artist for the Drag-up events. At the same time, the activities at the OoQA have provided us opportunities to learn about new tools and apply those back to our daily practicies. For Noam, for instance, what they experienced from the OoQA's relationship with VAM has significantly influenced their starting as a cultural worker, and it was also during the Queer Bookclub where they discovered their interest in theories which later guided their transition to academia.

A very comprehensive list of all tools that have been involved in the maintenance of OoQA: THIS WIKI, Google Drive, whatsapp, emails, etherpads, glitters, play dough, handouts, zines, ...

Funding

The OoQA is not funded (directly) by neither the Stimuleringfonds or Mondriaan Fund. (therefore we have no sponsor logos to indicate)

In the first years of our collaboration with the museum, we were all paid from the volunteers' fee.

About this wiki

You are invtied to enter our neuro-spicy, hyper-linked, always in-the-making wiki. There are no structures here, only entities and relations between them. Enter a page (entity) by clicking a blue link (relation). There you may find more links. You are invited to draw your own path by travelling across relations. There will be no guided tours, so please tread carefully. A red link means the entity does not (yet) exist, but someone thought it might need to. It may or may not appear in the future. If you have a suggestion about what to put there, please get in touch.

The search bar on the top of the page is the way most of us find our way around here. The left side navigation menu provides quick links to different sub-sections of the page among other handy tools. The center of the page is where the content we write goes. You can always browse through older versions of a page by clicking "View histoy". Take a scroll near the bottom of the page for more information such as tags, external references and citations. You can tread as far as you'd like into the wiki, but you might find yourself in pools of red links, navigation loops or even dead-end pages. If you get lost, you can always click the ZZZZZZ image on the top-left of every page; it will bring you back home (this page).

Disclaimers

• This wiki is incomplete; it is a product of the ongoing labour of some members of OoQA that is conditioned by resources, time and funding.

• We have had many members, past and present, and do not pretend to know or represent the perspective of each individual who has been connected to the group through the past number of years.

• Memory is a funny, fallible thing, so some recollections are filled with gaps, appendages and truth-mutations

• We are involved with the Van Abbemuseum: we work with them and not for them.

• Consent is a messy territory, and we can not reach everyone all the time. If you recognize yourself represented in any of the photos, texts or audio files, and would like this changed, please get in touch

• - OoQA as a group has spoken many languages but is mostly fluent in English. Sometimes we try to translate some pages to Dutch or other languages but this is not always the case.

• Unless explicitly mentioned, all contents of this wiki, including images, texts and other media are served under and protected by the YYYYYYYY license. This means that you are welcome to ...........................................