{"id":7386,"date":"2026-10-17T19:27:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T16:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/queercollective.cy\/?p=7386"},"modified":"2026-10-17T19:46:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T16:46:31","slug":"were-everywhere-but-also-always-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/queercollective.cy\/el\/were-everywhere-but-also-always-here\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re everywhere but also always here"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Every point of each of us coincides with every point of everyone else in a single point, which is where we all are. There is nowhere else. The idea of distance, or separation, or estrangement, is a dream. Which is not to say we should not mind the gaps. \u2013 Eileen Joy, \u201cYou are Here: A manifesto\u201d<\/p>

When I think of the most common questions I receive, about theory, about my practice and about \u201cthe cause\u201d, in their core always lies a certain lack of tangibility. Somehow, each questioning of political, activist, volitional and social work, comes with a restriction in practicality and the ways it\u2019s supposed to be thought through.<\/p>

\u201cWell, everything\u2019s great in theory, but how do we really do it?\u201d
\u201cCan you explain it to me as if I\u2019m 5?\u201d
\u201cSo you mean to tell me that you would yourself, practically sacrifice your own privilege for idealism?\u201d
\u201cSo then, you think that everyone should be radical.\u201d<\/p>

When I first started the Book Club, I had just returned back to Cyprus from Amsterdam – a place which occupied a sort of utopic escape in my head, only to be shattered away by the capitalist reality, every rainbow-washed metropolis unfortunately makes you face. I wanted to somehow bring together, like-minded individuals to converse in a \u201cconstructive\u201d way with no \u201creal\u201d end-goal besides, sharing opinions, ideas and hopefully, organize something bigger, form something communal. If community is something to be shared and celebrated, then showing up is half of the work. The question is though: How do we show up? How does one take up space?<\/p>

In the first session, I decided to dwell on the question of Queer Presence via Eileen Joy\u2019s text \u201cYou are Here: a manifesto\u201d. Joy questions the way we interact with the world around us and asks for a sort hetero-queer natality. An ideation that is in conversation with the world around us and its chaotic nature. If the heterosexist and patriarchal ideals we have ruling our lives, mandate linearity, precision and hyper-independence, how can one do the world, queerly?
If we are to examine the ways we perceive the world and reverse the process of \u201cawareness\u201d, how far do we have to go for our innate yearning of \u201cknowing\u201d and \u201cunderstanding\u201d to be fulfilled? Simply put, how much do we need to know in order for us to feel like we truly understand and hence, empathize with the Other?<\/p>

The world has the ability to exceed our comprehension. The way we create maps of consciousness, is derived from the way we communicate, interact and exist, alongside the Other rather than opposed to it. Even if your stance is that of hate, you still are with everyone else, here. Our realities are materialized by what we know and what we do, rather than by a natural, universal, all-encompassing knowledge of things that just \u201care\u201d. Before this comprehension, comes the amorphousness that is consciousness where things manifest from. If I am to ask you to think of a John, you bring up John from the vast goo that your brain is swimming in, only to link him to these words that are now being perceived within the same goo, as you read along, making John ride THIS wave of cognition, reading comprehension forces upon your neurons. We are all in link with everyone else at one single point \u2013 that of being and materialization. The world, is much more tangible than you give it credit for.<\/p>

Think of the technique of bricolage where artists take things that are of no use, and using their parts to make bigger art-pieces, compositions of trash, amalgamations of objects. The world and your awareness, does the same thing by experiencing and \u201carchiving\u201d everything through familiarity. Then, if we make sense of the world around us, by making that world familiar to us, would queering our perception imply a de-familiarization with everything we know? How much do we need to deconstruct a chair, in order for it be experienced as a foreign to us object? Is totalized and arbitrary questioning the only way?<\/p>

The first debunking happens from forgetting absolutes. An absolute is usually perceived as the \u201cend-goal\u201d of a body of knowledge, as the ultimate representation, as the thing par-excellence. Instead, let\u2019s think of absolutes as a detachment from representation. Its untouchable nature, its status of intangibility is nothing but a tool of detachment ultimately. By making itself as \u201csome\u201dwhere instead of here, by creating a self-measuring comparison that cannot be fulfilled (since if it did, it would no longer be an absolute but just an occurrence), it makes itself detachment personified. Think of celebrity (as analyzed in the previous article), think of the \u201cperfect\u201d body, think of the \u201cperfect\u201d relationship. None are as we think and none exist as realities beyond fiction. Absolutes have been loosened from systems of knowledge yet we need to remind ourselves that they have been birthed through them as well. Elon Musk bleeds just the same as all of us. A wall with all the money in the world, would not protect you from an earthquake. A removal of sugar spanning 15 years, will not bring back the affection that was lost by your deprecating ex. We think of absolutes as outside reality, as something unattainable, when in reality, our own positioning to them is what really, gives them their position. What would happen if the ladder I want to climb leads to a treehouse rather than a CEO chair? What would happen if instead of asking AI, I asked the river and the rocks? What would happen if instead of trying to squeeze my fat ass into fast fashion, I look for another shop? Ultimately, thinking through absolutes does nothing but creating an epistemological limit on human knowledge and thus, humanity at large.<\/p>

The second debunking happens when we dissolve the barrier between inside and outside. The rigid metaphysical illusion of strict and narrow boundaries between things, is a fallacy of awareness and of totality. The way things \u201cwork\u201d have only worked this way for only a few hundred years. We are not be-s. We are be-ings. We constantly evolve, we constantly expand our fields of consciousness through different neurological pathways, patterns and networks that exist simultaneously. There is a small Japanese boy right now, eating an ice-cream under a table somewhere in Kyoto while his mom is making dinner, yet you still believe that the main footing of human experience, happens within the confines of the four walls, you call home. There can never be a solid background through which our thinking makes sense, since that would restrict the ever-flowing current of thought and the basic premise of your existence, that \u2013ing that is following you around, constantly.<\/p>

The last and maybe most important debunking happens when we expand our definition of be\u201dings\u201d. I\u2019m aware that Elon Musk and the imbecile overlords ruling us at the moment are really trying their best to obliterate all life on this planet \u2013 and hey, who knows, maybe they\u2019ll succeed in a couple of years. However, as of now, as of this moment of 19:19, 06 Oct 2026, regardless of their efforts and our inability to stop them, all things still persist and all things still exist. We are in a democracy of life-forms whether we like it or not. We are in the same ontological footing as hippos, and trees, and the waves in Chile and the penguins who are riding them, and the weird homophobic dude selling corn on the cob on the Limassol docks, and the Spanish flamenco dancer who has now gone to Puglia and needs to learn tarantella and the clown that is running Israel\u2019s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The issue is that subjectivity is a bottomless void. We mistake our own confines and boundaries of awareness as that of the world. We exist in referential networks only with the things we know, and some people (as the aforementioned clown), refuse to allow their own natural expansion to proceed, falling in circuit loops of ego-driven singularity. Simply put, you are not the meter of comparison of how the world works. The world will continue working, even without your cooperation. You are not the force that erases awareness. Even if you burn all books, even if you forbid all whispering, the screams of remembrance and consciousness will always echo those who was an obstacle in their path. By realizing the incessant depths of our own subjectivity, we become more sensitive to its own abyss. Ultimately forcing us to be more human by drowning out the abyss in its own awareness instead, rather than projecting it upon others.<\/p>

A simple way to do this, is read. Read as much as your eyes can handle and your hands can bear. Read for all those who will not be able to in the future, and for those who could not afford it in the past. Texts ultimately are sentient beings that hide within them worlds of knowledge, words of magic and thoughts that are exclusive to this material. Flip your brain and turn a page, for time is shared with everyone, so might as well make it count. Ultimately, texts are constructors of inter-subjectivity for who can tell when a text or a reader is an \u201cit\u201d or when it is an \u201cI\u201d or when it is a \u201cwe\u201d?<\/p>

Here is the plan that Joy suggests:<\/p>

Force the be you are, that is self-centered, self-absorbed and characterized by the belief that only one’s own mind and experiences exist or matter, to start BeING instead. Listen to the chit-chat happening around you, with all the agents, things and objects that carry meaning. Have you ever spoken to a tree before? If you could listen to the chatter, that fly you\u2019ve had in your room for the last 2 days has be buzzing, what would she say? She wants to be your friend. You\u2019re just too stuck trying to find the window that you forgot the door\u2019s already open. Think of yourself as a slow recording device for your surroundings, and for music, and for literature, and for animals, and time, so the world can happen TO you for a change.<\/p>

Everything is a person of some sorts. Every body is pushing in against your own and every breath is in sync with yours. You can\u2019t stop the beat. Form as many alliances as possible since you\u2019re already where you need to be, and so is everything else: here.<\/p>

Make yourself available and hospitable and available, again, and self-donate. Anyway, we all already are occupied as is, so just put a sign outside that says so. In this way you give as much space as possible to everyone else that is there, which is here, to come as close as possible. The point thus, is not to vacate yourself and what you already know. Instead, it\u2019s to make space for the arrival of others who are already on their way, whether you realize or not. You just have to reach, even for the things that have always been right in front of you.<\/p>

Slow down. There is nothing that\u2019s important enough, for you to forget to breathe. There is no fire happening in your inbox and there is no fountain of inspiration happening somewhere else needing to be discovered through reels and curated posts. You and only you, can make new objects, give birth to things that are radical acts of coupling and hetero-queer reproduction. Pay better attention to whatever\u2019s already at hand and the Other and don\u2019t take yourself too seriously and just add something of beauty to the world, every single day, by one simple word, by one simple gesture. Hello. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every point of each of us coincides with every point of everyone else in a single point, which is where we all are. There is nowhere else. The idea of distance, or separation, or estrangement, is a dream. Which is not to say we should not mind the gaps. \u2013 Eileen Joy, \u201cYou are Here: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7395,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-club"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t