Queer Art Lab (QAL) is a safe space for experimentation, creation, art show, and intervention in the LGBTQIA+ community. Streamlines different actions from exhibitions, installations, concerts, workshops, lectures, and activities for the community.
We collaborate with artists at different stages of their careers in order to promote and at the same time promote encounters, exchange, and growth. The QAL positions itself for the LGBTQIA+ community with the mission of creating circles of sharing, connection, and mutual help to respond to felt needs.
This project is supported by the Trumps nightclub, space in which most of the activities take place. associated with the Queer Art Lab.

Art

This laboratory operates on two distinct fronts: the empowerment and transformation. The training is worked through the assignment of spaces where artists share their work and use internal networks available to earn income. The transformation is part of a more profound work to be done with the community and the surrounding collective in the sense of seek and create forms of intervention that reflect in improvements in what is the quality of life of queer people.
Our focus on art stems from the need to create content that brings different perspectives on the which is reality. Each person has their reality and crossing with the third dimension brings a set of individual experiences, which add to the collective experiences. Through this interception, new possibilities, and consciousness expands and embraces new ways of existing in diversity.
It is also through art that thought is provoked. intellectual and political and history is constructed either with brushstrokes, words, or movement
In this lab we will pay attention to what art queer wants to communicate with us.

Community

With the community what we want to work with is the elimination of the problem - discrimination, invisibility and prejudice - so that there doesn't have to be a Queer Art Lab, so no niche is needed, a segmentation for (sur)experience. In this sector we feel it is important to stimulate conversations, provide workshops, create forms of intervention to radically change the quality of life of queer people.
To think in which spheres we have to act, contemplating from youth to old age, and create projects in this sense.
Projects

Intervention

The first artistic intervention was conceived for the opening of Queer Art Lab in October 2021. proposal made to the artist Tamara Alves was to reformulate the access to the dance floors of the Trumps nightclub. The theme that worked was "Saudades", a Portuguese word that means a great feeling of missing someone.

Residency

The Queer Art Lab platform in partnership with Trumps creates its own first artistic residency, aimed at LGBTOI+ people with the aim of to combat the lack of access to education and employment with which they are confronted with these people, because of the present discrimination. This paid residence lasted 15 days and did not We require academic studies to apply.
The artist Tamara Alves assumed the role of mentor for the project. We also had 2 guest artists - ROD and Nicolae Negura - and 3 artists were selected after the opening of a open call - Miss Chimp, A. Melim and Inês Dust.
The focus of the residence was the reformulation of two walls of 10 meters each, inside the Trumps nightclub, to celebrate its 41st anniversary and the desire to re-brand the brand that starts a new decade, changing its slogan "The best gay club" to "The best queer club”. In this sense, and with a team of artists diversified, the premise launched was to rethink a world in that we can exist freely by being queers.
The great challenge of the residency was to unite the different experiences, experiences and aesthetics in two panels, two cohesive and large dimension.

QAL Event Gallery

Gallery