Slash-and-Burn

Co-presented by QAMERAD and Slow Burn Books, as part of Slow Index publishing residency program.

Wednesday 26 August, 2026, 6:00-8:00pm

Queer worlds are rarely built on untouched ground. They are pieced together from what survives: fragments of memory, interrupted histories, secret languages, stubborn pleasures. Gathered in Slash and Burn as a QAMERAD kaleidoscope, these works offer shifting glimpses of worlds assembled from such partial inheritances. The kaleidoscope reflects QAMERAD’s curatorial method: bringing distinct positions into relation without resolving them into a single, authoritative picture.

The title carries a contradiction. Slash and Burn can name the violence of clearing, yet it can also belong to small-scale cycles sustained by collective knowledge, restraint, fallow and return. Its meaning shifts with scale, duration and who controls the land. This distinction resonates with QAMERAD’s practice: modest in scale, collectively held, sustained through recurring encounters, and oriented towards cultivation rather than expansion. The programme inhabits the distance between cyclical cultivation and permanent extraction: between scorched ground and what may still be tended; between destruction imposed and regeneration practised in common.

Like these cycles, queer worlds may still emerge from ground shaped to sustain only certain futures—by colonialism, displacement, heteronormativity and neoliberal capitalism. Erasure is never complete: queerness persists by cultivating relations, rituals, and ways of living that exceed the terms of the present.

Across geographies and cinematic forms, the films approach queer lives not merely as subjects of violence or absences within hostile archives, but as agents of worldbuilding. Through reconstructed magazine clippings, digital footprints, animated faceshoppings, and care rituals amidst violence, they ask what can be made in the wake of rupture. Rather than restoring an intact past or filling archival silences too neatly, they fabulate. They do not treat devastation as generative in itself; their attention falls instead on the labour of transforming what remains. Each film opens onto its own world; in encounter with the others, new patterns, tensions and potentialities emerge.

Situated within QAMERAD’s 2026 curatorial arc, Worldbuilding Amidst the Fire, the programme moves through three gestures: deconstructing the structures that organise the present, speculating beyond their limits, and cultivating the relations through which other worlds might endure, return and be carried forward. Another world may not yet be fully visible; these films suggest that parts of it are already being rehearsed.

Screening Program

Ghariban / Dir. Angelisa Melissa / 2025 / 6 mins / Indonesia
FlyHole / Dir. Malic Amalya / 2017 / 6 mins / United States
A Gun is Useless in a Dead Girl’s Hands / Dir. Azian Nurudin / 1999 / 3 mins / United States
Palcorecore / Dir. Dana Dawud / 2023 / 6 mins / Palestine
Neo Nahda / Dir. May Ziadé / 2023 / 12 mins / United Kingdom
House of R3nc0ng / Rizky Rahad / 2022 / 25 mins / Indonesia

Co-presented by QAMERAD and Slow Burn Books, as part of Slow Index publishing residency program. Slow Index publishing residency is supported by Hyphenated Projects.

This event is presented in partnership with Composite. Composite is supported by Next Wave, Creative Australia and by Arts Merri-bek through the Flourish arts grant.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with curators Asmara S. Wigati and Syarafina Vidyadhana of QAMERAD, alongside Nikki Lam of Slow Burn Books.

Asmara S. Wigati

Asmara is a transmasculine writer, ethnographer, and visual artist based in Indonesia. As co-founder of Qamerad, their works reflect on a dialectical conversation between memories, collective mythologies, and political ruptures, drawing from vernacular archives and digital ethnography to explore queerness as an embodied technology.

Syarafina Vidyadhana

Syarafina is a Bali-based researcher, publisher, and moving image practitioner. As co-founder of Qamerad and Cahyati Press, her work explores cultural infrastructure, alternative pedagogy, queer archive, and the making of publics.

Contact the host of SLASH AND BURN