WHAT IS TRIUMF AMIRIA?

A nomadic polymuseum fluent in multiple artistic languages, TRIUMF AMIRIA is researching, disseminating and highlights queer culture and queer artistic production (literature, visual arts, theatre and performance, sound) in Romania.

Their practice involves love and empathy raised to hyperbolic power.

TRIUMF AMIRIA – Muzeul Culturii Queer [?] is an ever-changing expression of a complex process of queering ~ critical thinking about what a museum could be, therefore it reveals itself as a hybrid between a real institution possible in the confines of the Romanian context and an ideal construct.

TRIUMF AMIRIA is about the past, about the present and often about the unknown.

About the past because one of the museum’s goals is to research and reclaim the queer cultural production, especially from the interval of time that passed since an essential moment in the recent history of Romania: the repeal in 2001 of article 200 of the Penal Code, a gesture that meant decriminalization same-sex relationships. 

TRIUMF AMIRIA is also about the present and the future because it encourages new queer artistic practices, queer sensibilities and criticality through theater shows and performances – theatre festival PEARLS, PARADOXES AND ECSTASY, public readings, debates, educational programs, literature festival AGAINST EXPECTATIONS, exhibitions (series such as TRIUMF AMIRIA LOVE LETTER TO…, YOU FEEL ~ AND DRIFT ~ AND SING), workshops, guided tours, parties, networking events, etc. To create an extensive space for reflection about local queer culture, TRIUMF AMIRIA works in partnership with major institutions and progressive cultural organizations such as Replika – Center for Educational Theater, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), CNDB, Kunsthalle Bega, Suprainfinit Gallery, Switch Lab, spațiul THE INSTITUTE, Goethe-Institut Bucharest, Matka, Zina Gallery.

TRIUMF AMIRIA – Muzeul Culturii Queer [?] is in a state of endless development, transformation, becoming, questioning and self-questioning, and the TRIUMF AMIRIA MANIFESTO a river long text, an ultraconcentrated stream of consciousness traces, in an activist-poetic key, myriad possibilities for building of multiple futures, fluid, full of emotions with the contribution of the community. 

^*** queer is a term that has been reclaimed by LGBT activists in the 1980s, as was previously used as a derogatory term for people who did not fit into heterosexual norms (people attracted of the opposite sex) or cisgender (people whose gender identities correspond to gender assigned at birth). In simple translation, queer would mean “weird.” Subsequently, the term was further borrowed by academia and empowered into an ever-expanding critical theoretical concept that covers a multitude of marginal identities and experiences and that imagines and provokes practices whose social and cultural impact has a disruptive character from capitalist norms & cis -hetero-patriarchy. Thus, queer is used today, on the one hand, as an umbrella term for identities that have historically and culturally been and are discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, race, ability, ethnicity or other identity features other than the normal accepted in society, and on the other hand, as a theoretical and practical tool that from a critical and intersectional perspective, analyzes and intervenes in power relations and socio-cultural practices of categorization and marginalization. In this sense, queer is not limited to a stable definition, but evolves with theoretical research and practical experience. It proposes new modes of transformative action that concern a modus operandi in which differences exist but do not constitute the other inferior, wrong, crooked. incapable, undesirable, marginal, less valuable, on contrary identifies practices of interdependence and solidarity in which binaries dissipate and all identities and modes of knowledge become equally valid.