Experience

ANTWERP PRIDE 2023 | MAS Darling queer culture and film festival 9-10-11 August

Posted by Timothy on

It’s summer so it’s time for Antwerp Pride and Antwerp Queer Arts Festival (AQAF). From 4 to 27 August 2023, AQAF hosts queer artists being queer, in the alternative, quirky, more rebellious sense of the word. Antwerp Pride, from 9 to 13 August, is more mainstream, openly catering to everyone and thus attracting a general, more mainstream LGBTQIA+ and allied public. This year’s pride theme is ‘Braveolution‘.

The Museum At the Stream, Museum Aan de Stroom or MAS for short is organising an three-days festival featuring LGBTQIA+ talks and screenings. 

“Come to the first edition of MAS Darling during Antwerp Pride. A three-day festival with lectures & films that celebrate the diversity within the LGBTQIA+ community. We close with solid techno beats from, among others, DJ Kim Peers in the MASbox.”

A look at Café Strange

The MAS exhibits objects from Café Strange, which was the oldest gay bar in Antwerp for a long time. Wednesday, August 9, 2023 to Sunday, August 13, 2023 from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

The MAS acquired LGBTQ+ heritage from the contents of the defunct gay café Café Strange. On 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 August you can view a number of ‘stimulating’ objects from this collection at the Kijkdepot.

Wednesday 9 August

Lecture: ‘Violett. Support for sex workers‘. Sex workers are entitled to tailor-made help and advice. Due to their activity in the erotic sector, they have specific questions and are at risk. For various reasons, including stigmatization, they often find it difficult to connect with regular welfare and health care.

Violett supports sex workers throughout Flanders. Anne Vercauteren and Els Traets tell how they also offer discreet & anonymous advice and help to the various sex workers in the city here in Antwerp.

When: 9 August, at 6:30 PM. Where: The lecture will take place in the MASbox, one of the pavilions next to the MAS. Price: €5.

Thursday 10 August: Sodomites

Lecture: ‘Concealed desire. A history of homosexuality in Belgium‘. In recent centuries, it has often remained remarkably quiet around so-called ‘sodomites’, ‘buggers’, ‘yellow casters’ and ‘dirty women’. Nevertheless, ‘the love that dared not name its own name’ was anything but rare among us. This lecture reveals a hidden history and takes you through a forgotten world of bathhouses, urinals, back rooms and gay bars.

Jonas Roelens, co-author of ‘Verzwegen Verlangen‘, reconstructs the living environment of ‘pots’ and ‘pederasts’ in Belgium, from the Middle Ages to today, and discusses the changing mentality around a theme that only gradually became public for discussion.

When: 10 August, at 6:30 PM. Where: The lecture will take place in the MASbox, one of the pavilions next to the MAS. Price: €5.

Thursday 10 August: going Greek

Film: ‘Pink Ulysses’ (1990), Eric De Kuyper (98 mins). ‘Pink Ulysses’ is a homoerotic quest tailored to Richard Wagner, Zarh Leander and Sergei Eisenstein. Filmmaker Erik De Kuyper weaves together images and music fragments with the wanderings of Odysseus as a guideline. Rossini, Wagner, Leander, Eisenstein, Cocteau and many others provided the building blocks for this historicizing video clip on the theme of the Odyssey. Friends and acquaintances of the director borrowed their bodies, and little by little this adventurous search for beauty was born.

When: 10 August, at 8 PM. Where: The film screening takes place in the MASbox, one of the pavilions next to the MAS. Price: €7.

Thursday 10 August: DJ & drinks: Violently Happy

When: 10 August at 9:45 PM. Where: The drink with DJ takes place in the MASbox, one of the pavilions next to the MAS. Just drop by, reservation is not necessary.

Friday 11 August: Liquid sky

Film: ‘Liquid Sky‘ (112 mins). ‘Liquid Sky’ is a 1982 American science fiction film directed by Slava Tsukerman and starring Anne Carlisle in both the male and female leads. The film was shot without major actors, major funds or even permits in downtown New York City. ‘Liquid Sky’ has had a major influence on the club scene that emerged in Brooklyn, Berlin, Paris and London in the early 2000s, also known as ‘electroclash’.

When: 11 August at 8 PM. Where: The film screening takes place in the MASbox, one of the pavilions next to the MAS.

After Party: Oh Darling

MAS x Oh Honey. The MAS invites Oh Honey to the sizzling afterparty of MAS Darling. DJs Kim Peers (10 PM), Microwave (11.30 PM) and Illustre (00.45 AM) together provide an evening full of techno, new wave and electroclash.

When: 11 August at 10 PM. End foreseen at 2:00 AM. Where: The afterparty will take place in the MASbox, one of the pavilions next to the MAS. Price €9.

Antwerp Pride 2023 & Antwerp Queer Arts Festival 2023

Darklands 2023-2024

Queer Antwerp