QUEER/CUIR MUTATIONS IN TIMES OF APOCALYPSE
Interweavings from contemporary art, technology and society

In 1964, Umberto Eco coined the opposition between apocalyptic and integrated thinking around the new landscape that mass culture was shaping. A natural territory for the deployment of information, it was to actualize the eternal polarity between what refuses to disappear in the face of the thrust of what claims its place in that world, or perhaps even the vindication of a new world.

In 1945, the explosion of the uranium-235 bomb in Hiroshima and the plutonium-239 bomb in Nagasaki did not end the massacre. A piece of the world burns, the microscopic has an irreversible impact on the flow of space-time and morale, but the radioactive wave also definitely modifies the cells of organisms on a global level, as Karen Barad (2020) points out. Hiroshima is everywhere, Nagasaki is everywhere.

Today, the “barbarians” have been living among us for a long time. We know that mutation is already part of our daily experience: surely we have already become mutants. We are in a world that is undergoing the most radical and irreversible transformation of all those that humanity has undergone, and we do so accompanied by other transformations whose scope and protagonism do not even belong to us: it is other species that formulate them, they are machines of meaning, it is the planet itself that interpellates. Like the Queering Damage working group, we ask ourselves how we can generate paths that take us beyond reparative narratives or benevolent utopia towards a life that is more than human .

In 2019, Notre Dame de Paris burns. This is how Paul B. Preciado draws the event that marks the beginning of a new era. From the confinement experienced on a global scale in 2020, the virus becomes the epistemic category that infects cybernetic movements, relations between bodies, new mechanisms of control and with it, unprecedented forms of resistance: Black Lives Matters, #Mee Too, Rhodes Must Fall, Ni Una Menos, Taiwan Marriage Equality, Idle No More, among others. Wuhan is everywhere.

In 2019, Preciado presented his point of view on the trans body in front of a congregation of psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris. The tension involved in having the usual object of study put in front of the academic community to defend his own ideas caused such tension that, as the author explains, he had to publish the complete lecture -with all that was left unsaid- “I am the monster that speaks to you”. Preciado’s exercise is similar to “turning over” the table, or rather, our gaze, in search of what lies behind what is taken for granted. As Sahra Ahmed proposes in Queer Phenomenology (2019), what is left behind is often the invisibilized support of the myth of objectivity and neutrality of positivist thought.

From these images, we extrapolate the way of being and thinking queer/questioning to the tools that allow us to think the mutation within it, in its current, since in its evolution the categories, if they serve, do so only as fictions, as opportune entrance doors to territories in transit. In this sense, we hope to bring together researchers capable of connecting with other professionals, away from binary logic and from complexity. For this same reason, our call seeks to share speculations, critical views and/or research results from any field of knowledge, and proposes a radical meeting point between the arts, social sciences, humanities and scientific-technical disciplines.

Eco, Umberto (1964). Apocalittici e integrati: comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa. Bompiani.

Barad, Karen (2020).  No es asunto menor. Hongos nucleares, ecologías de la nada y topologías extrañas de la asimetría espacio-temporal pp. 150-181. en Matadero Estudios Críticos Vol. 1. Microhabitable Madrid.

Baricco, Alessandro (2008). Los bárbaros: Ensayo sobre la mutación. Traducción de Xavier González Rovira. Anagrama.

«About.» Queering Damage. Accedido el 20 de marzo de 2025. https://queeringdamage.hangar.org/index.php/About.

Preciado, Paul B. (2022). Dysphoria Mundi. Anagrama.

Preciado, Paul B. (2020). Yo soy el monstruo que os habla: Informe para una academia de psicoanalistas. Anagrama.

Ahmed, Sara (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.

«Inventory.» Possible Bodies. Accedido el 20 de marzo de 2025. https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory.

THEMATIC AXES

We propose four lines of research with the aim of approaching artistic practices that help us to understand the moment in which we live using an open and transdisciplinary concept of queer as a tool.

1. Post-capitalist and post-hegemonic desire (other non-capitalist desires). Collective and horizontal creation and production. Queer imaginaries for an anti-capitalist critique. Other perceptions and identities. Transmutations.
2. Obsolescence and/or barbarism as a metaphor or creative tool. Reaffirmation of otherness as aesthetic and political positioning. Other or disposable (non-productive) bodies and their importance, other knowledge (ancestral, collective,…) outside the hegemonic Western knowledge.
3. Relational interactivity: other ways of understanding interactivity. Cooperation, critical look at the hyperspecialization of knowledge and technocracy. Critical relational models. Hacker attitude towards digital technologies. Interspecies relations.
4. Science Fiction. Utopias/dystopias – Narratives and counter-narratives.

Keywords: Queer,  inter(intra)action, decolonial gaze, imagination, production, creation, obsolescences, dead ends, technocracies, hypermodernity, artificial intelligences, latent space…

WHO IS IT AIMED AT?

Students, teachers, researchers, artists and other professionals with an interest in contemporary art issues and contemporary social changes.

MODALITIES OF PARTICIPATION

• Invited papers
• Academic communications and reflections on artistic research
• The presentation of artistic proposals (texts, images, video, performance) together with oral communications is contemplated and encouraged. They will have the same treatment and will be included in the proceedings. In this sense, the only limitation will be the adequacy of each of the proposals to the infrastructure of the oral presentation and subsequently to that of the publication.

STANDARDS FOR THE PRESENTATION OF COMMUNICATIONS

• The format of the abstract should include the following information:
  1. Personal data and academic or institutional affiliation.
  2. Thematic area to which it belongs.
  3. Introduction, objectives, methodology and main conclusions. In case it is not a research work, the methodology followed should also be indicated.
  4. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words or 5 Mb.
• The official languages of the congress are English, Basque and Spanish: papers may be proposed and presented in any of these three languages.
• All proposals will be subject to a double-blind peer review process and the organizing committee will inform about their acceptance.
• Abstracts, papers and artistic proposals should be sent to the following email address: congreso.gizaartea@ehu.eus
• Deadline for abstract submission: July 14, 2025 (inclusive).
• Proposals must be original and unpublished. Very important: an anonymized file with the title of the paper and an abstract of 300 words or 5 Mb, followed by up to five keywords, must be sent first. In a separate file, the authorship and the institution to which they belong, and contact details: e-mail, telephone, address.
• For the presentation of full papers and artistic proposals, the same procedure should be followed, sending one file with the article or proposal, and a second file with the authorship and the institution to which the author belongs, and contact information: e-mail, telephone, address.
• Acceptance responses will be sent before July 31, 2025.
• Deadline for submitting full texts (optional): October 15, 2025. TEXT (± 3000 words) with optional images and graphics. Guidelines according to the format template.
• Full texts will be published in an indexed academic journal.

CONDITIONS OF PARTICIPATION

• Each person listed as an author must register both for presentation at the Congress and for subsequent publication.
• Certificates of participation will be issued to those who are registered for the congress.
• Certificates will not be issued in cases where the work is not presented during the congress on the date and time indicated. They will not appear in the book of abstracts nor will they appear in any of the publications derived from the congress.

REGISTRATION FEES

• It is free of charge.

CONDITIONS OF PARTICIPATION AS AN ATTENDEE

• Free participation. Registration at congreso.gizaartea@ehu.eus with name and surname.