film / with the soft resistance collective / upcoming / 15’11”
A group of queer friends temporarily occupies and transforms a University-owned vacant villa in Zürich. Inspired by the dreams and drawings of historical and contemporary queer communes and individuals, they discuss objects that ground them into queer ways of inhabiting space. From this emerges the outlines of a queer collective homemaking practice, committed to domestic resistance.
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This film was realized as part of a research project led by Giacomo Rossi and Qianer Zhu, titled Homemaking in Displacem.e.a.n.t.
Practices of queer homemaking in displacement can act as resistance against hetero-patriarchal norms, thereby critiquing power structures, and committing to alternative modes of living. In conversation with historical and contemporary queer communes and individuals living in China, Italy, and the diaspora, their research documented memories, labor, and intangible layers of homemaking. Testing these strategies at a vacant villa of ETH Zürich, they transformed the institutional space into a domestic one by queering space and furniture.
The project was presented as a talk at Princeton University in Spring 2025. It was also adapted into a fiction book.
