VIAD’s Radical | Others invites you to share in its partnership with Queering the Ga(y)ze 2026

For Queering the Ga(y)ze 2026, Radical | Others and PAP Studios convened a programme that underlined Queer Cartographies within a broader African context. The programme explored how South African queer lives were mapped across different kinds of lineages, remarkable uses of technology, and queer people’s varying contributions to financial liveability. Queer Cartographies was conceived by Nomacontsho Pakade and Nala Xaba. The programme treated mapping as a public method for seeing how queer life was made, contested, protected, and narrated across time and place, while keeping the continent in view as an archive, corridor, and pressure field of queer worldbuilding.

Queering the Ga(y)ze 2026 engaged artists-activists, activist-artist-scholars, and organising activists to examine three interconnected themes for the public dialogue series: Queer Ancestry, Digital Intimacies, and Queer Economies. Under Queer Ancestry, Radical | Others and the convenors reflected on reclamations and rejections of indigenous memory, considering historical figures alongside new ways of revaluing understandings of kinship beyond conventional notions of lineage. For the Digital Intimacies theme, the programme partners examined networks of care and belonging constituted online, as well as contemporary grief over the loss of public spaces for different forms of queer connection. Finally, though not conclusively, the Queer Economies theme began with the challenge of living precariously under strained livelihoods and considered both longstanding and emerging creative survival strategies.

Each theme of the 2026 Queering the Ga(y)ze programme explored a vital dimension of queer experience today. Together, the three themes offered a pathway towards collective, conversational reflections that returned what had become individualised knowledge to the queer community without flattening queerness into compliance metrics.

The “radical others” featured in the programme were anything but flat. In their individual differences and varied approaches, each person brought to the collective a sense of critical queer radicalism dedicated to worldbuilding through creative practice.

Following the ways in which Audre Lorde rooted radicalism in confronting the interlocking structures of racism, sexism, capitalism, and heterosexism, Radical | Others considered the radical as an actor who thought through the oppressions faced by marginalised people and engaged in the work of changing them. The radical was also deeply committed to the practice of care as integral to their own wellbeing and capacity to do their work, acting to ensure collective survival and freedom beyond the limitations imposed by oppression. The “radical others” who contributed to the Queering the Ga(y)ze: Queer Cartographies programme included:

Thursday, 12 February 2026 | 10h00–16h30 | Jozi Gold Brewing Company – Queer Ancestry

Dr Fikile Vilakazi, Albert “Ibokwe” Khoza, Buhlebendalo, Dr Makhosazana Xaba, HOUSE OF DITSIE and The Nkoli Experiment.

Saturday, 28 February 2026 | 10h00–16h30 | The Forge – Digital Intimacies

Akani Shimange, Anthony Olouch, Koketso Moeti, Tshegofatso Senne and Mamela Nyamza.

Saturday, 7 March 2026 | 10h00–16h30 | Jozi Gold Brewing Company – Queer Economies

Yasmin Carrim, Fundi Ndaba, Masana Mulaudzi, Thuli Gamedze and The Beloved Collective.

The cartographic programme was hosted by Radical | Others’ Research Coordinator, Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga. Across all three programme dates, Msimanga highlighted where “X” marked the spot and traced how contributors moved between different points of inquiry, experience, and imagination.