QueerSport is an effort to understand, propose, prototype, intervene in the norms through queer expressions without defining it. Z. Blace informs and instigates some of these practices in different constellations ranging from grassroots organizing, embedded research, media campaigns, educational workshops, conceptual artworks and advocacy for Cultural Social Responsibility for Sport.

Drawing on embodied experiences from the football pitch, Fisher uses movement, muscle memory, and narrative to discuss navigating a shifting terrain of femininity under the pressures of neoliberal growth. She uses somatic activism to question the enclosure of the market on the women’s game as felt on the flesh and its impact on movements and the connections between us. Powerful mechanisms of conformity take hold and gendered scripts dominate as players are pressured to prove their talent via football labor and their femininity via bodily labor to garner resources and opportunities. Discrepancies between representation and lived experience, what are the implications for agency, self-expression, solidarity and collective belonging? How could a look beyond the market-state to the embodied commons offer routes to emancipation and how we can conceive of a shared understanding about other ways to be together.

The emotional attachment and cultural expressions of football fans shape professional soccer worldwide. Clubs and the fan culture associated with them are often socio-cultural ambassadors for urban societies, regions, or countries. Since the mid-1990s, the male-dominated Ultras have been the central players of fan culture in Germany, replacing the so-called “Kuttenträger” and the hooligans. Many see them as the largest youth subculture at present. Stubborn and independent, sometimes even resistant, they operate in a highly commercialized environment shaped by massive security interests. What ideas and dynamics drive the Ultras? What is their relationship to profit-oriented clubs and the police? How do they appropriate public space? What role do girls and women play in the male-dominated scenes

Building Conversation is a dialogical art platform, based in Amsterdam, initiated by Lotte van den Berg and Daan ’t Sas, led together with Peter Aers. In the performative conversations they guide and perform together with participating audiences all over Europe, the theater itself becomes a public space. In over a 1000 performative conversations they explored the boundaries of what theater is and can be. Relating to the theatrical space as a temporary public space; a place in the midst of people, built with our bodies and words, that makes actions and interactions visible and revalues ​​presence. Everybody present joins and together they evoke the fiction, which in this context does not stand for fantasy, the ‘as if’, but rather stands for a heightened reality, an extra focus on what is, ‘the very present present’. Not in the first place concerned with what takes place on stage, but focussed on the way in which we can create stage together.

The Silent University, initiated by Ahmet Öğüt in 2012, is an autonomous platform for academics who cannot share their knowledge due to their status of residence, because their degrees are not recognized or regaining access to academia is blocked for other reasons. It is a solidary school by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who contribute to the program as lecturers, consultants, and researchers.  The Silent University proposes a new institution outside of the restrictions of existing universities, migration laws and the other bureaucratic or juridical obstacles many migrants face. At the same time it mimics the idea of exiting universities, using their representational logics by developing alternative structures of pedagogy beyond border politics, race/ethnicity and normative education. Current branches of the Silent University include Hamburg, Stockholm and Mülheim/Ruhr. Former branches were located in Amman, Athens, London and Copenhagen.

Bodies are containers for life, they exist in the present yet carry the past within. Attuning to one’s body and senses is attuning to being in relation with one’s environment and with the myriad of other bodies and life forms that exist in countless shapes and sizes. Bodily knowledge or, “knowing in and through the body”, as philosopher Jaana Parvianen puts it, has been long suppressed in the Western epistemological accounts. What happens when we begin to listen to and with our bodies, when we embody what we know, when we form collective bodies that can act beyond the capacities of individual bodies? How does artistic and curatorial work that attunes to diverse bodies and bodily knowledges contribute to the emergence of transformative agencies and collective action?