This interactive Twine-based project is conceived as an art-installation that uses narrative storytelling to foreground enclave cultures of LGBTQIA+ communication and activism in urban Bangladesh. The project is conceptualized through the lens of 'Critical Making' both as a field of critical inquiry and a site that mobilizes trajectories of creative social justice engagements and makerspace activism and resistance against institutions of social oppression in the context of South Asia. The project came out of a series of Twine workshops organized in Bangladesh in February, 2022 by the artist, and it focuses on the extreme marginalization and oppression of the LGBTQIA+ community by the heteronormative and cissexist political, legislative, and religious institutions of the Bangladeshi nation-state. The project traces story-telling and documenting techniques by Bengali queer subjects as both queer curation and queer enclave counter-public formation and emphasizes the importance of Twine at the center of such LGBTQIA+ activism. Recalling Anastasia Salter’s theorizing of Twine’s ability to revolutionize and disrupt normative ways of storytelling, and Twine’s orientation towards queer and feminist outlooks, the project foregrounds how Twine as a platform coupled with critical feminist and queer makerspace practices can become a powerful tool against networked cis-sexism and queer-bashing not only in the context of Bangladesh, but also more globally. Elements of the project can be found here - https://mohammedrashid.net/socially-engaged-art-and-critical-making-projects/queercity. The final version of the installation will include interactive Twine storytelling sequences that will invite participants into the world of enclave queer cultures and makerspace activisms of Bangladesh.
