WOEKER is a multidisciplinary artistic & activist program where trans, intersex, agender, non‑binary and genderfluid artists take center stage. From 13 to 29 November, it will unfold across Antwerp, Ghent, Leuven, Hasselt, Bruges and Brussels. It is a collaborative effort between Antwerp Queer Arts Festival and Genderspectrum, who organized Belgium’s first Trans Remembrance Expo last year. 

WOEKER takes its name from the Dutch word for unruly growth — a tenacity of life that insists on itself where it shouldn’t be able to, like weeds pushing through cracks in asphalt. We recognize this same vitality in trans and gender diverse communities: being told we are “out of place” yet cultivating new ways of living, caring, imagining, and resisting. Like weeds, we create networks beneath the surface — kinships, solidarities, shared knowledge — that allow communities to flourish in unexpected places. They make collective life possible despite relentless attempts to uproot us. 

WOEKER embraces the weed as a symbol of resistance and possibility  — revealing the cracks in the structures designed to hold us back — and celebrates the adaptive, subversive, and inventive strategies we have employed to take root within the margins. We invite works that move with this unruly vitality: practices that grow sideways, reclaim space, unsettle boundaries, and imagine futures beyond the tidy, the controlled, and the normative. 

The artistic & activist program takes place during Transgender Awareness Week and leads into Transgender Day of Remembrance, which memorializes trans people killed by anti‑trans violence. The week grew out of TDOR, which was founded in 1999 by trans advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith to honour Rita Hester, a Black trans woman murdered in 1998. Created by trans people for trans people as a form of remembrance as resistance, it insists that those who were erased in life will not be erased in memory.

Through exhibitions, performances, screenings, workshops and conversations, the artistic & activist program cultivates community and celebrates the multiplicity of gender‑diverse artistic practice. We are looking for work by trans, intersex, agender, non‑binary and genderfluid artists across all disciplines. We are drawn to work that surprises, moves, questions, delights or opens up new ways of seeing the world. Themes can include, but are not limited to:

 

• remembrance

• visibility

• joy

• care and chosen family

• resistance

• becoming

• home

• bodies and desire

• everyday life

• imagined futures

 

Submit your proposal before 24 July 2026.

Public debate may narrow. Life doesn't. 

Welcome to WOEKER.