AQAF

We are a queer arts festival rooted in Antwerp, carried by volunteers who are at once artists, curators, performers, thinkers, and organisers. Artistic work and organisational work flow into one another: who we are behind the scenes and how we collaborate is part of the content we put into the world. We move between disciplines because queer culture has always crossed boundaries and looked for new forms.

Our choice to be volunteer‑run is deliberate. We work in a way that gives each other time, space, and support. No hierarchy, no pressure to optimise: we choose forms of collaboration in which responsibility is shared and everyone cares for the whole. It also speaks to what we refuse: professionalised, compartmentalised cultural production.

Our mission is not to grow bigger but to go deeper. We choose complexity, risk, and intimacy. We do not see visibility as a goal in itself, but as a question: who remains excluded, who gets to be visible at what cost, and what it takes to truly belong. We build long‑term relationships with artists and partners.

We use the word “queer” deliberately — not as a synonym for LGBT+, but as a position that questions and refuses normative structures. For us, queer is something you do: in choices, in structures, in encounters, in risks, and in allowing what does not neatly fit. That is why we choose tension over assimilation, complexity over representation, practice over posture, risk over legibility, solidarity over charity, and pleasure as a political force.

We do not create a “safe” space, but a space for encounter, friction, vulnerability, and possibility.

When we collaborate with institutions, we do not seek recognition, but a willingness to truly work together — including shared risk, fair payment, openness to change, and the defence of work that provokes tension. We only collaborate when it enables something none of us could realise alone.