A series of events celebrating in 2026 iQt’s 20th anniversary

Still from “In Yellow and Green” (Tali Tiller and Antke Engel, video 4’20, 2020)

Cohabitation is more than sharing the planet; it means living together with those we do not choose. Cohabitation refers to radical heterogeneity and inescapable conflict that comes with the chanced existence of being-in-the-world. Cohabitation is not limited to the human world alone, but includes all the living creatures, non/human others, and ghosts or spirits, as well as the natural, socio-cultural and technological environment (e.g., digital worlds, machines, architecture, cultural heritage or religious sites, languages, and art).

“Queer Cohabitations” seeks to bring together discrete discussions and formulate a new parlance about trans and post-human ecologies, precarity of queer lives, racialized capitalism, and authoritarianism, about loss of (bio-)diversity and of democracy, as well as calls for climate and planetary justice.

It also raises methodological questions of queer-ing and trans-ing, and considers myriads of possibilities to ameliorate conflicts and mitigate violence. Queer cohabitations provide a particular perspective, which underlines the ‘becoming’ of sexed and gendered experiences—embodied and situated, imaginary and virtual, affective and intertwined with dynamics of power and desire. It also imagines a continuous process to understand the shift in ‘desire’ and thus, by default, queer cohabitation enriches itself with the changing environment, it listens to marginalized, subaltern, unheard, or presumably unintelligible voices. It believes that there is power at the margins of history, and wisdom in multispecies kinship.

In line with this, we engage with Davina Cooper’s recent take on Conceptual Activism, in order to envision and prefigure social change, and to critically rethink the iQt’s contributions to queer theory and politics.

Justice remains at the core of our ‘imagined communities’, against the upsurge of neoliberal conservatives and authoritarian right-wingers, who are brutally undermining them. We need a robust, multi-species, planetary, pan*sexual, trans*versal sense of justice—this is what we explore and enact as a form of conceptual activism with the series of events on Queer Cohabitations.

Considering this, on twenty years of iQt, we organise series of events globally—between communities and countries to bring them closer—to explore together the meaning and becoming of trans-queer desire in time to come and to belong in a world sans frontiers. It seeks to help people forming a community where there is none and forge ties with the many, where it is fragmented. Under the banner of Queer Cohabitation, we seek to ‘demand the impossible’ – a polity for all to live and thrive together.

Sagniquee Banerjee, AntkeAntek Engel, Karolina (kasu) Heck, Friederike (Fred) Landau-Donnelly, Rafael Baioni, Samu/elle Striewski

Save the dates!

March/April 2026: Collaboration with Desbatismos/Debaptisms: Cartografias Dissidentes e Práticas Artísticas de Desprogramação/Dissident Cartographies and Artistic Practices of Deprogramming (Fer Nogueira, Arts Department at the Federal University of Paraná)

Monday, 30 March, 2026, ICI-Berlin (and online): Conceptual Activism – a day of workshops, panels, and queer cohabitation.

Friday, 13 März 2026: (Under)worldmaking @Queer Cohabitations – Initial event: Book presentation, conversation and videoscreening with Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, followed by a sparkling party.

Naomi Rincón-Gallardo (book cover, Temblores Publicaciones, 2025)

More dates will follow soon.