Szymon Adamczak
Session 1
How do we support artists who understand themselves or their work as queer? What kind of professional communication about their practice is relevant to them? How can we reposition and reframe ways of offering feedback to support, nourish and empower individuals as much as the communities and ecologies of exchange they are part of? In the first talk, Szymon, joined by Elioa Steffen, will bring into perspective insights from long-term engagement with queering artistic feedback organized by a platform In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities in the context of Amsterdam University of the Arts. In a communal setting, with two cohorts of queer, trans and non-binary artists and researchers from Amsterdam, we have been exploring theories and methodologies of queering performance feedback. Our approach promotes a sense of caring co-learning community that brings queer-feminist principles to work, while resisting extractive and identitarian tendencies in education.
Session 2
In the second session Szymon and his guests are presenting a reading performance inspired by Warsaw correspondence of Bob Mellors, a gender non-conforming, working class activist and a co-founder of Gay Liberation Front UK. For the past two years Szymon has been investigating a Polish chapter of GLF in the early 1990s, which came to an end abruptly when Bob was found murdered in his own apartment on 24 March 1996. Mellors had left behind a vivid account of living queerly in Poland right after its socio-political transformation. He speculated on the impacts of AIDS, westernization and the dangers of rampant neoliberalism that would eventually force the gay community to say “goodbye to discretion”.
Bio
Szymon Adamczak is a dramaturg, writer, theatre and performance maker working across disciplines. He has a vital interest in HIV-related culture, in transnational LGBTQIA+ activism and in queer heritage. Born in Poznań in 1991, where he was part of a young arts collective and studied liberal arts. Worked as an in-house dramaturg for public theaters in Kraków and Warsaw. Based in Amsterdam since 2016, alum of DAS Theatre.
In his own creations, Szymon explores the subject of rehumanization, weaving poetic imagination, visual sensitivity, theory, performative archival research and physical performance. With a background in organizing and programming in the arts, he draws on the proximity of artistic practice and civic engagement. As a dramaturg he often works with themes of autofiction, cultural trauma, embodiment and movement. Szymon sees pedagogy and teaching as a conceptual extension of his practice. With IPOP queer educational platform, he reimagines artistic feedback and co-authorship from the perspective of community, empowerment and body autonomy.