AMOQA, Athens Museum of Queer Arts: Inventing Survival Tools and Designing Dissident Itineraries

Abstract

How and why do we, as queer people, occupy and create community-based artistic spaces? What sorts of performative forces and dynamics are activated once we adopt the name ‘museum’? Is AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts), whose creation is discussed in the present article, a ‘museum’ or a social centre? How can we imagine alternative ways of blending art, activism and politics? For example, how do the politics of drag and hacking relate to the making of a queer feminist space? These are some of the questions this article addresses as it explores the creation of AMOQA in relation to the messy binaries of public/private, proper/improper, high culture/low culture, and useful/obsolete. By examining the intersections between these binaries, we wish to tell the story of AMOQA as a performative collective endeavour, as a character in drag, as a sort of ‘hacking’ intervention.