Meet Status Queer

In this edition of the Learning Space, you will meet Sam Message (they/them), a drag performance artist with „a background in working with museums and galleries“ and Kolbrún Inga Söring (they/them), an artist with a background in „photography, large scale spatial installations and community building“. Together, they founded Status Queer to empower members of the LGBTQ+ community – one event and one project at a time.

I was introduced to Inga and Sam at the co-working space Kolgruvan in Gothenburg, Sweden and there was something about their presence in the room that made me curious about their story, the things they make happen, why they engage in them and what we can learn from them for creating a more inclusive higher education space and practising active allyship. Intrigued? Great, let’s meet them.

Inga came to Gothenburg to study a master’s programme in Fine Art at HDK-Valand (Academy of Art and Design). Sam, on the other hand, watched the film ‚Folkbildningsterror (2014), „a queer, feminist, anti-capitalist musical“ shot in Gothenburg. They thought: „There must be some kind of queer underground. This big community must have come together and made this kind of saucy little underground film.” However, the LGBTQ+ community the film suggested did not quite meet the reality Sam faced when moving to Gothenburg. „I realised that that community had disbanded, the spaces in which they had gathered had closed down, and everyone had either left the city, was burnt out or was just not part of the community anymore.“ But Sam did not get discouraged and contributed to creating a community of their own with Status Queer. Let’s explore how.

1. When and how did you found Status Queer?

Sam: It first started when you, Inga, interviewed me for a project that you were doing. We realized how much of our beliefs aligned and that we had very similar interests.

Inga: I organized and curated a festival called ‚Enqueery: Festival of Queer Curiosity‘ for my Master of Fine Arts graduation project. The festival was cancelled [due to the Covid-19 pandemic], but Sam was supposed to perform at the festival. In the preparations for the festival, we learned that we share all these passions, this drive, these political views, and needs in the city that we were not having met.

Sam: I think also we both share some of what has been considered radical ideas around inclusion. Basically, what's going on out there is just not good enough and you have to make changes now.

Sam and Inga joined forces to respond to an open call for an exhibition at Galleri Box in Gothenburg. While Inga and Sam did not get to do an exhibition, they were offered to run a Performance Week in 2020.

Sam: Then we started thinking of this Performance Week as a springboard for something else, an opportunity to build something that is more all-encompassing. And we started thinking about this idea of the ecosystem: how could we use this platform to foster the growth of a new kind of culture in the city which would perpetuate itself without us? Then we could just partake without having to run all of the events ourselves. That has yet to come to fruition, but it is starting to roll forward on its own, which is super nice. Our mission statement as an organisation is to use culture and arts for and by LGBTQ+ people to bring together a new constellation of some of the most marginalised people in our community. We think of art as a practice with a relational strand and a spatial strand. So the spatial strand is thinking about how different spaces inform the kind of interactions that we have with each other. This can include making big spatial installations or thinking about what kind of meanings and rituals are attached to established spaces like museums and galleries. The relational strand thinks about how we can use scripted and non-scripted events or non-scripted interactions to guide the formation of new relationships with people. And the idea is that we can use these two things to bring together new groups of people, who may have not had contact with each other before, and get them to start building some connections between these groups.

Inga: It is not only important that we have spaces for coming together, but also events and reasons to come together, open spaces for people to speak to each other and meet. This is something that we're really interested in: sparking a connection between people.

2. An important goal of Status Queer is to improve LGBTQ+ people’s quality of life. Do you see cultural events as the main tool for Status Queer to work towards this goal?

Sam: Exactly. And I think the way that we theorise arts and culture is that it can be like the heart of the community, the thing that draws people together. One thing I'm thinking about right now is we're running this free drag school (‘Initiations’) to have an evening of drag performances. And something like drag can create this kind of amazing feeling in the room where it's exciting. But it can also be people getting on stage and saying something that's very political and saying something to the whole community. And then it can spark these different kinds of conversations in the community and draw us together in this other way. A core idea of our work is to not just make things, it's supposed to be us empowering other people to have their own agency, to be able to make things on their own terms. And that helps give our community a political voice, which is so important for articulating what we need on a broader level so that we can actually have our needs met by the society that we live in.

3. In your work, you focus on five priority groups within the LGBTQ+ community that are most excluded in Gothenburg (economically precarious and working-class people, racialised people, people with disabilities, elderly people, and binary and non-binary trans people). How did that process of identifying priority groups look like?

Sam: A lot of my educational background was in looking at accessibility in museums and galleries, but also reading a lot of critical theory, anti-racist kind of theories and strands in academia. And so we were asking: Which groups, in general, are marginalised in society? And then we thought about it from the perspective of intersectionality [defined as „the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage“ in the Oxford English Dictionary] within the community. We both brought our theoretical perspectives to that. And then we also looked around the room at events and asked ourselves: Who's not here and why are they not here?

And we developed our priority groups with some of the people we've collaborated with. We also invited an ethnographer to come and stay with us for four to five months to observe everything we were doing and then to talk to lots of different actors within the sector and different members of the community. We also continue to refine our priority groups. So now we are using the term for instance, economically precarious and working-class as opposed to just working class. The ideas of who we are and who we need to reach the most are constantly evolving.

Inga: Yeah, and how we can make those categories inclusive, so people can identify with them. Which is one of the reasons why we've changed the working class category.

Sam: Exactly. We both come from middle-class backgrounds, but we are also in a very economically precarious position. So we had some people say to us „I don't feel comfortable saying that I'm working class, but then I also can't afford to buy a ticket“. Most of our events are free entry. But if there is something that is paid, and you belong to one of our priority groups, you can get free entry, you can get free refreshments or you are first on the list to come in. So we have these kinds of ways of making sure that the space is primarily for the people who need it the most.

Simply put: accessibility is something that is very important to Status Queer. Accessibility does not only refer to physical or economic barriers, but it is „very complex and woven into people's identities and experiences of society“. To Sam, accessibility is closely linked to representation: “If you think of something like the city museum, our heritage is something which informs how we think of ourselves in society. And if that is only reflecting certain people's stories, and excludes others”, then the museum does not represent everyone. While “these institutions might have really good intentions”, Inga argues, “it does not mean that I am going to feel comfortable there”. Both Inga and Sam agree that “there needs to be like proactive action to invite certain groups in” as well as to critically reflect on history writings and power structures in order to be accessible and open to all groups in a society.

Building a much needed space

While Status Queer is still a young organisation, it has already come a long way. What Sam is most proud of? „That our concept has actually worked“. They take the example of the festival Sparkplug, held at Galleri Box in Gothenburg in August 2021: „“We made this big installation, which is super colourful. We designed this furniture that folded down from the walls, designed to be sat in a particular way“ and to spark conversations. After a week of workshops, including embroidery, speech karaoke or for example comic drawing, „I could hear people who weren’t even in the same workshops throughout the week socialising in this space. And they were sitting in this conversation circle having very touching and heartfelt conversations about being queer and being trans in Gothenburg.“

Status Queer has built on this empowering experience in their events and projects: „We have really seen that our community has come together around what we're doing“. And while „we have not always been able to reach all of the groups that we want to reach, Inga and Sam managed to bring people „from all different walks of life, different ages, racialised, non-racialised, people with visible disabilities together“. These observations are mirrored by the feedback Status Queer receives from members of the LGTBQ+ community and collaboration partners alike. „I've had people telling me very emotionally ‚I've wanted this kind of space my whole life. And now it's here.‘ And we feel like it's very needed and important. And everyone we present the project to is like, wow, this project is amazing. Which feels really validating. I'm not gonna be shy about it. It is.“