It would take us ten thousand times one thousand years to tell the timeless story of the queer archipelago, an archipelago of emotions, histories and identities.
The Romanian language wouldn’t be enough to express all that we are.
Our hybrid language.

We have one mission: to be reincarnated into an infinity of identities.
We hide within us the secrets of the world.
Queer fluency.

From a marginal position one sees things differently.
One sees the world askew.

Queer time seems to have different values. Our time is not the time of those democrats who roll up our misery.

Marginal people have their own version of history.
We’ve experienced a history that ranges from Stonewall, New York, to Hijra from India or Muxe from Mexico. The world as seen through the magnifying glass of marginality is a world passed through the filter that perverts official history. There is no objective history. History is written by means of lies.
We recover a fragmentary past and we are the glue that fills in the mosaic of our own history.

20 endless years after the repeal of the infamous article 200, a moment that made possible a profound change for the liberty of those who feel queer, we are here in all our glory:

TRIUMF AMIRIA. The Museum of Queer Culture [?]

In a moment of acceleration we’re making the first step ~gigantic/~countless/~small to the transition from imaginary to fluid flesh and blood.

Twisted and hybrid nativity, to the bone.

In stock-piled layers and underlayers: location – RO, utopias, perspectives ~ balkanik/ ~ occidental/ ~ oriental, desperation, anxiety, life in block of flats, life in clubs, rural intensity, Norwegian funds, the sounds of violence against our bodies, nightmares and horror flash-backs, academic dives into gender studies, museum research, precarity, excessive metamorphoses, metamorphosis as an endless process, the need for new mantras for those lacking basic rights, for the crooked, for Roma people, bio incense to protect us from bigots and religious trolls, the necessary tools to dissipate the heavy clouds brought about by patriarchy, by greed, by exploitation, cherimoya flowers, redemptive pleasure, working-class rights, tardigrades, humor, tears of all kinds, cutting rainbows, hope, massive traumas ignored for millennia, the flames of activism and loooveee.

The countless TRIUMF AMIRIA parents are cramming a playlist with queer lullabies.
One of them, “All love is legal”, manages to do something amazing: it pumps the vital energy one needs to start every day as intensely as possible. We carry along with us the history of every word, image or rebellious gesture that has paved the way for the endless possibilities that have and will be.

Act civil.
Be civil. Eat civilly. Walk civilly. Dress civilly.
When you’ve done all this, you will get your model citizen certificate, perfectly integrated in a world where you’ve got the right to feel as alienated as everyone else.
And even when you’ve become civil, it still won’t be enough, because you exist in the East, the uncivilized space par excellence, a corrupt utterly prejudiced East, that we have to look down on and for which we have to take on a civilizing mission, isn’t it so?

Our bodies can still feel the cold creeps of the jail bars from the jails that we’ve visited. We could have sought revenge for all this misery of ours, but, instead, we chose to use our bodies as tools to imagine an utopian future, where all of us, absolutely all of us reproduce to infinity and beyond their most deeply hidden identities.

For decades, we’ve hidden ourselves in society’s darkest places, our humanity being rejected.
The state has rested its heavy boots on our necks, has insinuated itself into our bedrooms and requisitioned our most intimate desires. We’ve developed an extraordinary capacity to resist, to dissimulate, to transform ourselves and construct an infinite number of parallel realities, in a race against the clock for the validation of our own existence.

In spite of all this, we’ve never doubted our own identities.
These identities are and have been a total of desires for intimacy, a common cultural background and a non-verbal language, constructed just to identify each other.
We’ve talked through signs that only we knew about, through the gaudiest of colours, through randomly exchanged glances. Gossip as a way to connect with each other and pass on the news about us and with us. We’ve survived stuck between the jaws of an immobile vice that marked us for life with the symbol of sin and crime. Sodom, Sodom, Sodom everywhere.

If you’ve got no power, you’ve got nothing to lose, and this is what gives you the biggest power – to reshape the world in our image and likeness, as the alternative is extinction.

We’ve gone through all phases of the complete metamorphosis: we were a patient larva that was waiting and waiting for time to pass, moulting over and over again, until we reached the perfect shape to evolve into a pupa, where we industriously wove to seclude ourselves in a cocoon made to protect and hide, out of our daily work.

We freed ourselves from the cocoon once 2001 was here and we fluttered our nympha wings just to brag to the world:
TRIUMF AMIRIA!

The enthusiastic signals show us that we were long awaited.

{ Are you ready? }

A triumph to celebrate all triumphs ~ big/ ~ dreamt of/ ~ small.
In a rite of passage just as ~ exhausting as ~ surprising we eagerly breathe in our past and present victories. With our eyes open we dream of making the prophecy of a better future, a more queer future come true.

TRIUMF AMIRIA would rather change the world than keep pace with the way in which the world changes.

Fluent in multiple queer artistic languages.
A polymuseum, if you like.
We do research, we disseminate, we support and bring Romanian queer culture and cultural production into the spotlight.
We constantly search for haunting metaphors, hybridities afresh, as well as modalities to dissolve the hate speech and violence against the marginal, the non-normative.

Language is the form by which we mutually identify, we facilitate different cultural complicities and we transform realities. We play with language in order to produce infinite universes and to imagine worlds in which our stories are heard, read and listened to.

We discuss the possible and the impossible, we question the definite and the indefinite, we analyze the rightful and the unrightful. We change texts, costumes, gestures, perspectives and characters with fluidity. We are the effort of one together, the achievement of ‘to be’, a journey of resilience and an amalgam of possibilities. Having no system, no useless hierarchies, but with all genders included. Autonomous but independent. Connected with the community where it came from, observing its moves, its needs, trying to create a meeting space, where one could express, recover or heal themselves through art. “We” comes before “I”.

TRIUMF AMIRIA reintegrates moves, words, bodies whose stories were until now too seldom told. We overlap realities, we dislocate verisimilitude lacking eloquence, we provoke meta-pluralities.

We ask around and ask ourselves: could revolution be a more rebellious evolution?

It’s very likely that you’ve already heard of slow revolutions (because they seldom take place overnight). Exactly our case. We constantly cultivate a better reality, with every project that we accomplish (finish), while we assiduously work to dismember and throw to the dustbin any oppression and discrimination (visible or invisible) which draw a horrible portrait of our society.

We have let others speak about us and for us, without knowing our experiences. Our voice was stolen from us. We squeaked as a sign of disapproval and we planned our parallel future, where norms are obsolete. Shock as an emancipation tool. Symbolic and pictorial violence as a form of resilience against physical and structural violence. We are not a whole, we do not coordinate, we reproduce our ideas and souls in the form of Brownian motion.
Nocturnal animals with infrared vision. We conquered building after building, party after party, city after city, exploiting the fear of the other. Broken blue bandages.

Citizenship is not an end in itself, because the state is not an end in itself, but rather an arrangement that has facilitated our oppression in the name of a common good from which we were excluded and thrown away. It is not a struggle for power, it is a struggle to annihilate power. Barbarism.

In a world dominated by so many oppressive structures, we struggle to help each other, to give meaning to our lives.

Just like any other museum, we carry the responsibility of legitimation on our shoulders. We are not interested in using such a power in a way other than to cover, to enfold queer art in love – it doesn’t matter whether is made by visual artists, actors and directors or writers, musicians, designers etc. This is our manifesto.

The art that we encompass is in a continuous movement. Allergic to straight and obvious lines, we bring together nonlinear narratives to make room for marginal people, for minorities, for critics.

At the meeting with Art History, we will bring at least three of our art sisters: the elusive Hidden Realities disguised under the banality of normcore – a greige blend of passive resistance -, the intense, no-makeup & no-frills Raw Reality, and last but not least the all-glowing, flamboyant and equally feisty master of escapism: Reality in Drag aka Queer Futurity.

Isn’t it weird how many reactions a drag queen can trigger?

We all live in drag through the daily performances we put on in front of others.
As a political act, drag isn’t anything new, but it reproduces itself over and over again and to this day has the same transformative power to bring about change and break the normative and dominant status quo that divides us into either men or women, gay or str8, closeted or out. Nonetheless, drag meets with violence because the collapse of the status quo brings about the reimagining of the binary world we live in and the questioning of one’s deepest feelings about one’s own identity.

In the terrifyingly frozen scenery of clear-cut definitions, we are dynamic – a relational construct, an ever-changing expression of a complex process of queering ~ critical thinking of what a museum could be.

If the dimensions, duration and intensity of art are variable, why wouldn’t the definitions of a museum be as such?

Our relationship with the definition of a museum and with all the expectations from such an institution is at the same time parasitic and nutritious. In this conflicting area, inspired by many other queer perspectives on museology, we want to reflect upon all the separate elements that make up this definition.

The organizing principle of Triumf Amiria is queering.
On the outside. But also on the inside – what we call auto-queering.

Auto-queering includes everything: from the way we subvert the expectations about what might be an appropriate name for a museum to unexpected solutions for building a collection of works, from imagining a cosmogony of hybrid symbols for an ever-changing institutional identity to the quirkiest ways and places in which we’d tell stories to both friends and strangers in exhibitions, theatre shows or literature or the imagining of radical possibilities for archiving fragments of fleeting memories, of dust, of desire, of the criticality that most of the time society would rather sweep under the carpet.

By cracking the elegant shell of perfect definitions, we want to see with our own eyes what is negotiable and what we could transfer from the utopic regions in which our imagination frolics to a tangible reality.

In the TRIUMF AMARIA kitchen, adventurous ideas pop up and expand like the most enthusiastic popcorn. We will introduce and test them one by one – a touch of pragmatism in our approach to continuous revolutions.

As we adore the perfectly limitless abilities of the question mark [?] to throw down the gauntlet at power, it gives us an unspeakable pleasure to plant it in most of our endeavours; so as to question, to challenge, to resist, to unravel, to stimulate curiosity, to enable processes of critical thinking and interrogation. And sometimes to season existence with a touch of humour and irony.

How open and queer are we? Are there limits? Of what kind?

How carefully and how cautiously do we position and reposition ourselves in the local-global (dis)continuum?

How far and how ~ quickly / virtuously / ~ slowly can we push ourselves to make the transition from unfavourable conditions – intense realities marked by precariousness, fragile infrastructure, self-exploitation, the constant need to call on the generosity of the artists to disseminate their own work – to an ideal construct of a queer museum?

How can we use research, ~ works of art / ~ performances / ~ immaterial works, knowledge of the past, magic, notions of advancement about/on collectivity, dance or other possible pleasure(s) in order to recover the suppressed stories/histories (feminine and non-binary / ~ them) to evoke futures, polyhappiness and a consistent sense of disidentification?

In fact, which slips from the norms and rules of the museum would outline the ideal queer museum?

Are we helpful? To whom? We will keep on asking you.
We promise never to forget to ask ourselves as well.

We will reveal TRIUMF AMIRIA as a hybrid-loving hybrid that moves on what for us is the holy ground between a real institution brought to its maximum possible limits within the Romanian context and a utopian construction.

By contextualizing and advancing queer artistic perspectives/approaches, we aim to deconstruct the multiple paradoxes that shape Romanian realities and others beyond.

We will try to unpack, deconstruct, annihilate binaries such as feminine / masculine, premodern / modern, human / non-human, nature / technology, real / virtual, north / south, pro-science / anti-science, grassroots / top down, visible / invisible, drag / ultra-real, centre / periphery, axiom / metamorphosis, masterpiece / garbage, radical / canonical, hierarchical / rhizomatic, representative / irrelevant, real / fictional, utopian / pragmatic, normative / subversive, evasive / direct, system / anti system, legitimate / illegitimate, new / traditional, etc.

All this to feed pluralities, the juiciest of ambiguities, dislocated from the generous spectrum of nuances between extremes and especially beyond binary constructs.

Why orbit around two notions, when the third, the fourth, the ~ zillionth can gloriously multiply the depth and breadth of an idea ~ identity ~ community?

Through its presence, TRIUMF AMIRIA stirs up queer left and right and you never know when and where it will happen, in a continuous process of subversion, reimagining both the present and the past. TRIUMF AMIRIA chaotically recovers anything that could have been queer and gives new meanings to official history. It places in their time the artifacts of queer history and reinterprets history through a queer lens. The ground of TRIUMF AMIRIA is the universe.

TRIUMF AMIRIA is more than a depository, it actually wants to build itself together with and for its community. In a continuous artistic and curatorial search, we feed on the fragile threads of memories of theater, literature, music, visual arts, design, architecture, with courageous acts of the present, with the unnamed future.

We use our rediscovered voice to release a visceral cry in the public space, ours, everyone’s.
Neither pickled nor frozen, but alive and agile.

TRIUMPH AMIRIA is about empathy and love, conjugated to suprainfinit. A lady of flowers that enters the minds of those full of hatred to have a conversation. Happiness with a drop of lime.

Having often operated in hostile or unfriendly environments, we value the power of alliances with other museums, associations, institutions and friends that host art and queer dreams. Fragile cultural structures that support our structure and become queer amulets, open to be transformed in their turn.
Even if one day we’ll get our own house (a room of our own), we will be just as interested to explore countless other locations and types of collaboration.

Before and beyond anything else, what a wonderful thing it would be if one day we could settle down rent free and do our part in your mind and imagination.
We offer queer art. A nourishing exchange for both parties involved, don’t you think?

TRIUMF AMIRIA is a journey, an experience, a discovery: artistic, literary, performative. It is an initiation into the queer ecosystem where the environment is not created according to dogmas, nor are the roles performed according to canons. TRIUMF AMIRIA collects alternative ways of seeing the world and inflects them in a platform of debate.

Queer because it encompasses all our identities without imposing a predetermined norm and assigning us to predefined houses. Queer because infinity. Queer because we break down the barriers of any kind of binary, thus revealing intrinsic forms of our humanity. Queer because it has the courage to imagine a radical utopian future in which nationalism and power regimes are relics of a long-forgotten past.

And yes, queer because we look at society through a critical filter through which we question social relationships, the place of one or the other in history and the perverse mechanisms of power reproduction. Queer because it makes us doubt ourselves. Queer because it has the power to destroy, regenerate and refuel a world of compassion and empathy. Queer because it gives voice to the voiceless, in a radical process of transforming humanity. Queer because sexuality, identity and beyond. Queer as a method of solidarity. Queer as a way of life. Queer as an index of emancipation.

Loneliness is not so bad when you’ve gotten accustomed to it and use it to your advantage so as to build, just like an arachnid, a complex methodology to reinterpret the world through a queer lens. Sometimes you take it slow and stay calm, other times when the opportunity arises you dive headfirst to generate an expected earthquake. When you want to ambush, to take by surprise.

TRIUMF AMIRIA is nomadic, safe and open. Open to anyone who is curious and free from prejudices and stereotypes. Open for meetings with artists and their art. An institution in which classifications become poetry, and labels no longer divide the world in good and evil, in weak and strong.

Artifacts lost in history and placed in history, which carry with them the marks of our common past. The souls of those like us are our playdough. We’ve known each other, we’ve met each other, we’ve sniffed each other and our complicity eats us alive in silent suffering.
We collect the fragile memory of shows and performances, dissolved in time, imprinted in a few words, images and many memories.

Unlimited, disobeying, amorphous, untamed, fluid, TRIUMF AMIRIA was made to resist.
TRIUMF AMIRIA has taken over the Word.