Create Care x The Qollection

The Qollection is a queer collective that focuses on sex education, community care and intimacy. We believe everyone has experience and knowledge which is valuable. The Qollection creates spaces in which we can exchange our experiences and knowledges witheach other to learn more together. In this we strive to take a queer, intersectional, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist approach.

In these seven community care sessions at the Queer Gym Rotterdam, we will collectively explore what we need as a community to care for ourselves and each other through different approaches and practices. How do we as a community create a space in which we learn more about the kind of care we give and the kind of care we wish to receive? How can we come together and carry each other through our shared processes of healing, grieving and feeling joy. What do we need for that? And in what different forms can we do that? We invite you to come to this space and create the community we need together.

Week 1. Intro in community care

Looking back at our history of different queer communities, we will research what communities inspire us and why. We will in a creative way show our appreciation to them and together discuss the “lessons” we can learn from these communities.

Week 2. Communiciation in community

In this session we go into the ways we deal with conflict within our community and think about the ways in which we can better our communication with each other.

Week 3. Communal grief: Altar making

In this session we will tend to our grief in community. Through different grief rituals and practices, such as making an alter, we will create a space for our grief involving the body. Inspired by the work of Camille Sapara Barton and the collection of grief rituals they put together in their book ‘Tending Grief’

Week 4. Embodied healing: writing a letter to your body

Our body carries us through life, through difficult moments but also through moments of pleasure and joy. In this Queer Care Session we want to take a moment to appreciate and acknowledge our bodies by writing it a letter. We will come together and share our experiences of this with each other.

Week 5. Embodied pleasure x pleasure nights

A guided Qleasure* Practice is a session where we dive into what Qleasure feels like in our own bodies. We will experiment with feeling and being within our own bodies. Within this frame, there will be exercises guiding you to help this exploration.

*Qleasure or queer pleasure does away with normative notions of what pleasure is 'supposed to be' and starts from the source, you. Qleasure doesn't draw hierarchies between different forms of pleasure. Qleasure knows no shame, embraces all, and breaks binaries and borders. Qleasure knows that everyone is an expert when it comes to their own pleasure, we just need some time and space to figure it out sometimes ;)

Week 6. Reciprocity x Joe

functioning in a gift economy, the earth gives us gifts what do we do in return? learning to give back as an important step in foraging ethically, how can this unify us with the planet and each other so that we can begin to reintroduce ourselves to the ecosystem that keeps us alive.

Week 7. After care

In the final session of this series on community and care by the Qollection, we will come together to enjoy food, talk and create together. Together we will make a zine on our experiences, examples and ideas on community care.