How does loss shape us? How do the afterlives of violence inhabit our words? How do we write amidst the unending piles of horror, mourning, loss, and defeat? What does queer theory fail to offer in the face of terror?
In this session, we seek solace in the healing power of poetry, cherishing the tulips that haunt our intertwined histories. Together, we will cultivate futures that bloom in hands tending to these tulips—symbols of sacrifice, love, home, and our shared vision of liberation.
Through collective acts of reading, humming, listening, and sharing, we hope to unravel, even slightly, the heavy burden of the unmourned. This is the space we wish to create and the attempt we hold close.
BIOS
Niloofar Rasooli is a writer from Iran, with a radical passion about the intersection of anti-colonial queer feminism, erased memories and archives, resistance, rebellion, revolution, and the reclamations of the built and lived environment in Iran and the Global South. Previously, Niloofar worked as journalist, writer, editor and her writing is featured in Women’s Studies Quarterly (forthcoming), gta papers (forthcoming), Kohl: A Journal of Body and Gender Research (forthcoming), International Journal of Islamic Architecture (forthcoming), Harasswatch, trans Magazine, Woz, 1.mai Committee Pamphlet, Koubeh, Etemad, Kargadan, and Abadi, among others. Currently, she is busy writing her doctoral thesis at the Department for History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich.
Sandra Cane is a writer and independent researcher of queer and trans studies. Her works examines radical imagination of futurity as a cultural practice of queering normative narratives of the present. She writes for magazines and digital platforms and collaborates with collectives, independent spaces, and institutions, realizing performances, publications and talks. In 2023 she published her first collection of texts with the Italian publishing house Einaudi. In the academic year 2023/2024 she was guest professor of Gender Studies at University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
