Course Description
QUEER FUTURES MEMORY LAB is a collective memory project for queer folks living on Turtle Island. Participants will apply the science of the archive to the ritual of building an altar for co-creating a private database of memories. For this session, entries will focus on the year 2020 to the present. We will celebrate queer visionary thinking for sustainable futures by combining community made art, alchemy, somatic healing, and disability justice frameworks to document our joy. We will also use these methods to process both personal and collective grief that stems from the projects of disaster capitalism, climate crisis, and the erasure of othered communities.

Over three months, lab participants will create two pieces of work (a photo, a poem, a voice recording, a film, a song, a list, an object, etc) to contribute to two archives, one for grief and one for celebration. I am referencing the act of contributing to the archive as a ritual, as if setting an altar. There are options to turn down lights, repeat information, take pauses, light candles, wiggle around on or off camera, and exist in our full mystery during these rituals. Because the contributions are personal stories within our shared experience as queer people surviving with the land of turtle island, my hope for this space is for us all to literally see each other's visions for community care and sustainable futures and sigh relief amidst our strength. These pieces of work will live on in the archive that folks can return to after the lab. In revisiting these pieces, folks can pay homage to their own resilience and brilliancy, like returning to a sacred site.

How to register
Two options:
1) Sign up as an individual and meet community during the lab.
2) Sign up as a pod of up to 4 co-dreamers/thinkers/friends. The content of the lab will encourage vulnerability, so having friends around can help ease anxiety around sharing. This way you can also split the cost on any point of the sliding scale.

Nudges of encouragement if you are a co-learner, a healer, a builder, a storyteller, a creative of any medium, an archivist - digital or analog (journaling, memory boxes, video, photo, field recordings, etc).

* Four no-cost spots for BIQTPOC will open up on 3/21, solo or pods *

Schedule
QUEER FUTURES MEMORY LAB opens, breathes, and closes over the course of 3 months. The sessions will be held via Zoom to cover the following:

MARCH28 // touching the present moment
body scan // inviting our bodies into collective space // what is an archive and why does it matter? // an archive of our own

APRIL25 // practicing grief
discussing the image of suffering // subverting the monolith // getting specific // getting sad // altar building >> participants present what they have created for our grief archive // guided meditation

MAY23 // allowing joy
pleasures of aliveness // honoring legacy // Being while building // altar building >> participants present what they have created for our celebration archive // guided mediation // feeling joy

If the urge to forget, to disassociate, or to escape from the tension of ongoing socio-ecological shifts is a form of grief, could this grief also be an entrypoint for dreams? What worlds do we build with our deepest desires? What worlds can’t we see because they are blocked by grief? Memories hold power to dictate the course of our personal and collective histories, so the intention of this offering is to access, retrieve and create memory with peer supported self-authorship.

Facilitator Bio
PANGAN EGGERMANN is an experimental filmmaker and text-based artist whose work studies the inherited, the unseen, and the felt. Pangan’s practice is caregiving and receiving which feeds their passion for co-creating validating community space for pleasure, resource and knowledge sharing. They live on the land of the council of three fires in Chicago, IL where their father was raised and where their mother immigrated 40 years ago. Pangan’s ancestry is of alchemists, wizards, storytellers, healers, and pre-colonial folk whose collected pains and joy they honor in their writing and work.

To keep in touch, subscribe to their newsletter In House with Pangan Eggermann.
Or for more direct questions you may contact them through their website panganeggermann.com