Would you love trans if trans spread around the world like wildfire? Would you love trans if LGBT characters in books made your kids gay?Sick of having to defend queer and trans life – as valid, natural, normal enough, marketable even – this year’s queer program at IDFA is themed Contagious & Queer. 

Saying gay loud and clear with the premise of contagion is not the same as coming out for self actualization. It is not the individual that is set free when queer is understood as contagious, it is queerness let loose.

Curated by Simon(e) van Saarloos Contagious & Queer opens with a Muck Studies performance by Geo Wyex. Tracing Black eco-geographies through lineages of rice, flies and blackberry fruit, filmmaker and visual artist Leila Weefur joins from Oakland, California to screen and discuss their work Tillage & Fury. A viral mix of documentary and sci-fi, director Shu Lea Cheang shares the feature-length film UKI. The avatars and characters in UKI are performed by queer artists based in Berlin. Among them is musician and multi-media artist Sky Deep, who closes the night with a DJ set. 
 
Program Sunday November 12:
16:15 walk-in
16:30 Start program, introduction by curator Simon(e) van Saarloos
17:00 Muck Studies by Geo Wyex
17:30 Break
18:30 Tillage & Fury by Leila Weefur
19:30 Break
20:45 UKI by Shu Lea Cheang
22:20 Sky Deep DJ set
01:00 end of program

Contagious & Queer continues the rest of the week with workshops by Shu Lea Cheang, Leila Weefur, Angelo Madsen Minax, Geo Wyex, Adriana Knouf, Flip Driest and Lani Hanna and a performative exhibition by Sands Murray-Wassink with Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping.