Photo: @monjerri
We are still looking for participants living in Germany to join an international youth exchange on Drag, taking place in Berlin from 4-11 January 2023!
What is the project about?
With this youth exchange, we want to bring together 32 young queer people living in Germany, Greece, Tunisia, Slovenia and Armeniato celebrate, try out and perform Drag!
Drag artists – drag queens, drag kings or drag quings/things – play on gender norms to exaggerate and challenge the gender binary. Drag acts combine various forms of performing and visual arts and allow queer people to showcase their talents outside of the formal structures of traditional artistic disciplines.
What is your own drag persona? How can the art of make up or dressing up help us to blur gender, to perform gender and to break out from gender norms? We invite you to a week of queer empowerment, make-up, performance and movement workshops. Berlin-based drag artist Queen of Virginity will run the workshops and support you in your path of creating your own drag persona. We will also invite other drag artists to give workshops and we will talk about the history, present and future of the art of expressing gender outside the norm. And we will discuss how we can use this to stand up for our political beliefs.
Final performance. We will create a final show with performances by all of us in the group who want to show what they learned and came up with during the week. Of course no one will be pressured to perform if they don’t feel comfortable.
What will it be like? We already organised a similar exchange last year. You can see a video of the project on our Instagram page to get a better impression.
Who can apply?
Be queer, questioning or an ally! This project is made by queer people for queer people, those who are questioning their sexual or gender identity and strong allies of the community. With this project we want to create a safer space for all of those of us who identify with being trans, inter, non-binary, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual and queer.
People with multiple discriminations prioritized. We will prioritize applications by queers who experience other forms of discrimination as well (e.g. racism, classism, ableism). The venue is unfortunately not wheelchair-accessible. We will do our best to make the project a safer space and we will create the project based on the individual needs of the participants. We also really encourage people who haven’t travelled at all yet or haven’t travelled a lot yet to apply.
Living in Germany, Greece, Armenia, Slovenia or Tunisia and be between 18 and 30! We unfortunately cannot make exceptions here due to our funding.
Be able to participate in the whole period 4-11 Januar 2023! It doesn’t make sense for you to come to the project late or to leave early, as you would miss important sessions.
No previous drag experience needed. The exchange is targeted towards people with no or little Drag experience. We will support you in your journey during the week and there is no pressure to perform. 
If you are a bit experienced already, we might ask you to support your fellow queers.
Where?
The project will take place at a hostel in Berlin-Weissensee.
Costs?
There is no participation fee and the project will include accommodation, travel costs up to 180 EUR (Germany) and three free meals a day. This project is funded by the European Commission through the program Erasmus+.
Contact
From our team, Queen of Virginity and Thomas will be the ones coordinating this project. If you have any questions, please feel free to write an email to Thomas at thomas@cqs.berlin.
Funded by the European Commission:
The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.