20–23 Apr

Pavilion Project | I will again become your special comrade

Mehmet Süzgün and António Manso Preto (students of Critical Studies) were selected through the Open Call by Public & Projects Rietveld to take over the Pavilion of Rietveld Academie for one week in April 2026.

Mehmet Süzgün and António Manso Preto initiated the project I Will Again Become Your Special Comrade, where they transform the Pavilion into an exhibition-as-study-space, where they will be reimagining gay Marxist thought collectively within the contemporary moment.

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You aren’t sure if he is comrade or a cumrade… I Will Again Become Your Special Comrade is an exhibition-as-study-space that brings together visual work, texts, and collective reading as a way of reimagining gay Marxist thought collectively within the contemporary moment. The exhibition and reading group approach the homo-Marxist tradition not as a historical doctrine, but as a set of desires, aesthetics, and political problems: collective life beyond the family, pleasure against productivity, intimacy against property, and the refusal of normalization. We’re all maybe a bit more gay than marxist or more marxist than gay, doesn’t really matter… Capital has actualized itself to assimilate all that opposes it; through a similar lens, we ask whether desire might or not be organized outside such assimilation.

To take Pasolini’s example: “To understand / that few know the passions / in which I’ve lived; that they’re / not brotherly to me, and yet / they are / my brothers because they have / passions of men / who, joyous, unknowing, whole, / live experiences / unknown to me.” Men become a reminder of the self’s own inadequacy as a man, while, at the same time, the object of desire may also be a possible comrade. Both positions are, even independently, rewarding. Desire thus produces an enlarged capacity, where time, politics, and identity orbit around a poetical praxis that affirms it. (Homosexualize urselves today!…)

20 April, 17:00 - “Pleasure and Profit”

Reading group on poetry by Pasolini, Jack Spicer, and Pedro Lemebel, discussing how these works engage Marxist ideology and aesthetics through queer relationality and sexual and romantic practices. Through close reading, we will consider how these texts work with and against homosexuality and what’s a faggot’s place within Marxism.

21 April, 19:00 - Screening of Race d’Ep (1979)

A four-part French experimental documentary co-directed by Guy Hocquenghem (author of Homosexual Desire) and Lionel Soukaz. The film traces twentieth-century homosexuality, from early sexology to street cruising in Paris, moving across different homosexual landscapes. It argues that homosexual identity and liberation did not emerge in the 1960s, but have roots extending back to the mid-nineteenth century.

23 April, 17:00 - “The Screwball Asses” by Christian Maurel.

Reading group of selected excerpts. The text was first published anonymously in 1973 in the controversial issue Trois milliards de pervers of the journal Recherches, edited by Félix Guattari. The issue, which focused on sexuality and particularly homosexuality, was banned by French authorities shortly after its release. Due to its anonymous publication and thematic proximity, the text was long incorrectly attributed to Guy Hocquenghem. It engages with representations of homosexual desire outside normative frameworks of identity and morality. The text explores sexuality as a set of practices, drives, and relations that challenge fixed categories of subjectivity, reflecting the broader intellectual and political context of post-1968 France, psychoanalysis and disruptive and/or collective dimensions of desire.