Digital Queer Archive Africa & Diaspora
Contribute to a living archive documenting queer, trans*, and gender-diverse histories across Africa and the diaspora. Receive €600 honorarium.
The Digital Queer Archive in Africa and the Diaspora is launching an open call for contributors to participate in a long-term project dedicated to documenting queer, trans*, non-binary, feminist, and alternative gender histories across Africa and its diaspora. This initiative seeks to challenge the persistent myth that queerness is foreign to the African continent, instead foregrounding its deep historical, cultural, and social roots.
The archive brings together objects, images, texts, and testimonies, connecting contemporary LGBTQI+ lives with longer genealogies of African gender diversity. It resists the imposition of Western frameworks of queerness, prioritizing critical, situated, and decolonial approaches to knowledge production.
The project welcomes cultural practitioners, artists, researchers, activists, heritage communities, organizations, and museum professionals from anywhere in the world. Contributions may focus on historical or museum objects and their queer dimensions, or on contemporary materials connected to queer life in Africa and the diaspora. Suggested themes include remembrance, community, queer ancestry, visibility, healing, spirituality, healthcare, body politics, and social inequality.
Contributions may take the form of short essays, object analyses, artistic responses, interviews, or multimodal works combining text, audio, and visual material. The curatorial team will support contributors throughout the process, offering guidance as submissions are developed into completed archive entries. All submissions are currently accepted in English.
Selected contributors will receive a one-time honorarium of €600. The project is led by Thsidy Kamogelo Ngoma, Nneoma Angela Okorie, Noam Gramlich, and Isabel Bredenbröker, with institutional support from partners across Africa and Europe.