📌@ddd_kunsthouse
💥 Free of admission

@nze_bikoro / @me_dvin / @uni_versek / @heather.kapplow

Exit Pathways is a performance created as the result of a 2-day workshop on modes of resilience, safety, communion, transforming trauma into empowerment.

In a 1961 radio broadcast, black queer activist and artist Lorraine Hansberry asked: “is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?” Hansberry’s burning house is a symbol of revolution, class struggle, and the relationship between property and citizenship rights in a racial capitalist system. It requires dismantling the familiar down to its functionality, focusing on Black revolutionary struggles. She claims the delusion of the nation not as a local problem but as one shared with multiple world communities. Her account of the home is a conflictual space with two potentials; one for renewal and self-recovery, race identity and gender and secondly a contradictory condition that is contractual, enforces personal needs, power and (delusional) desires.

We do not need to integrate into a nation that conditions our mental, financial, spiritual, and physical entrapment. We do not need to be saviours to save the master’s burning house, but we can walk away embracing our imagination to become something else where we are no longer targets for our predators, our oppressors. What kind of sustainable practices can we form for community-led work, resilience, alliance, solidarity, care and transformation?

THE BLUE OF HIGH ZENITHS is a performance art festival curated by @untitled.tbilisi / @sabrina_bellenzier, this year taking place in Yerevan from 1 to 4 May, 2025. Exploring the ephemerality of the present and future of queer rights in the region in connection with the current authoritarian drift, the programme brings together art activists from the Caucasus region and the neighbouring countries.

The second edition of THE BLUE OF HIGH ZENITHS takes place in Yerevan, Armenia, with a decentralised approach: each day showcases performances, screenings and panel discussions at diverse locations across Yerevan, symbolizing the multifaceted nature of the queer experience and the project’s dedication to dismantling both physical and metaphorical barriers.

In 2025, the programme reflects on the drastic processes of political and social mutation currently undergoing in the Caucasus region and its neighbouring countries, on the feelings of uncertainty and looming catastrophe that are widespread in the region and beyond, researching how queer and feminist communities come together to create spaces of care and practices of resistance. With a focus on the queer body as a frontline, a radical tool of resistance and political imagination, THE BLUE OF HIGH ZENITHS researches tactics and tools to develop transnational collaboration, solidarity and activism in the face of the common struggles.

The project is supported by @performeurope (project CONSTELLATION - led by @performanceartvideo ), by @womensfundarmenia and by a synergy of @goetheinstitut_georgien and @goetheinstitut.jerewan . The project is in part funded by the European Union. The project is also partially supported by @thesupportingactfoundation - Impact Grant.

Special thanks to our partners that open the doors of their spaces for our performance art gathering: @hayartculturalcenter , @how.evn , @ddd_kunsthouse , Almast Factory, @artbasis