An Introduction to the Salon of Queer Indoctrinations

Elio Troulakis (they/he) – aka St.Elio – is the founder of the Salon of Queer Indoctrinations (henceforth the Salon). The Salon takes the traditional idea of a salon as a cultural gathering and creates a series of themed performance nights, based around the collective exploration of social and cultural concepts relevant to queer thought.

One of the series’ aims is to map out the complexity of contemporary intersectional queer thought, and facilitate community learning, and generate collective knowledge. It also serves as a platform for new queer makers to present their work, as well as to connect and learn with other queer artists and audiences alike. There’s a group discussion between everyone present at some point, too.

Elio, a long-standing member of our bar team, is a well-known face at WORM, certainly to those who spend some time hanging out at #Wunderbar. And it’s appropriate that we asked Elio about the salon whilst sat in #Wunderbar’s Stube and on the terrace, on a sunny afternoon in late April. It’s where we took some pictures too, courtesy of PR intern, Eliška Čubova.

OK: to dive in at the deep end… This word complex; what is the complexity in the Salon, why this word?

ET: The series title is already quite complex, I think. I should say at the beginning that I like pretentiousness, a kind of self-conscious pretentiousness: nobody can say, or remember the name, and I think that is part of the fun.

But, complexity in general, I think, is at the core of my practice and it is certainly at the heart of the Salon: this idea of dealing with complex, or multifaceted issues within society but approaching them in a way that is digestible for people, and avoiding the “gatekeepy” aspect of critical theory and philosophy around this topic.

I think complexity should be accessible to everyone in the end, we just have to find the language to do this.

That sounds like an oxymoron! Though complexity is being pitched by you as a strength here.

Yes, and I think this is where performance really comes in handy, as a tool of communication. You can also induce feelings to add to the understanding of a situation or a problem. It doesn’t always have to be reason, or rationality that gets the point across.

Feeling as a core tenet of arts practice. Or feeling, as embodied knowledge used to present things: can you say why you think that is important?

I think it comes into play as a counterbalance to the way the world has functioned since, I guess, the Age of Enlightenment. There is this narrative that rationality will take us forward. It’s this process of – and I am going to use a trendy word now – decolonising, or questioning this colonial heritage that we have, which often promotes the use of rationality. You know: “People who engage in higher thinking are of a higher position in this world”. And there is a lot of knowledge that is indigenous, or folk-related, or embodied, that is either being lost or forgotten. There are things that we are incapable of dealing with that are actually forgotten. And having our brains over-functioning all the time just doesn’t do the whole work.

Also versus the screen culture that accentuated this Linnaean ideal…

I think that screen culture is also a problem here, yes, and I see that there is a turn towards live performances and physical work that relates to this absorption in our phones. I think this has been a recent trend within the performing arts in general and a countermovement to the rise of AI: and it’s gaining more traction.

You are a performer. Often, the idea of “performance” is so amorphous. How do you see, or place the idea of performance in what you do?

For me, performance is an awareness of the presence, at least as a performer, of a switch, that somehow goes on in my brain, and where it really becomes about what I am doing in that moment. It relates to meditative practices in a weird way. This is the experience of “the performer” but it’s also about how it affects the people who witness it. So: there is a saying in performance that, “performance needs an audience”, that you should never perform for yourself. And there is some truth in that; you want to affect the person who is witnessing that performance. But for me, I really like to work with this understanding of physical presence, to be reminded that we all have a physical body and we exist in specific moments in time and space.

Do you find this stuff you do restorative? And as a reminder for other people?

This is my experience: I find a lot of healing through performance and it realigns me. It’s – partially – also my aspiration that I could also affect this in other people. I don’t necessarily always expect it and I think there is a trap in *just* thinking in this way. There is a dominant “language” or presumption, that I am constantly trying to work around or at least be aware of, of how much power I hold as a performer.

The idea of power is often linked to performance…

It is and I think it’s very important to approach performance with care, to know why you are doing it. As you know I have a lot of horeca experience as well, and I know what it means to welcome people into a space and to give them a good experience: one that is partially curated. Performers must be aware of that; the audience is there to support somebody and to experience something, that you need to be kind to them and take them on a journey.

And again if you shock or fight the audience, and make them feel uncomfortable, you need to know why you are doing this.

What kinds of reactions do you get with the Salon? Do you get uncomfortable ones?

So far I don’t think I have got any uncomfortable reactions – as far as I can remember. Things tend to be a bit less aggressive, maybe a bit more explorative, and tender.

Obviously people feel a need for this. What kind of need do you feel is being expressed towards you by an audience?

It’s a good question because: I honestly don’t know! I think audiences are being a bit shy. I always end the Salon with a group discussion where I can get either a common understanding, or multiple viewpoints on the same topic. This is for my mosaic*. But I don’t get any direct reactions to the work itself. I do think it makes people think, the format challenges their perceptions of things. And each Salon has its own topic, and the artworks for each relate to that topic, but I try to make it so that they relate in different ways, so the artworks give tension.

People have told me that they have left, if not exactly troubled, but provoked in their thoughts.

This is your fifth Salon, as we speak. How do you see the topics evolving over time, do you have a set programme or is it something you incrementally build over time?

It slowly changes – like a mosaic. It started with three live performances and I wanted to incorporate video as well because it’s a time-based medium so there is a performative aspect to it as well. Also financially, it’s easier to book a short film. Now in the last one(Salon number 5) we added a workshop to add an interactive layer.

As a format – three things back-to-back with a break somewhere – it works, more or less. I am curious to see how I can further transform the programme because it can be transformed, it asks to be. And it’s also the queer way to do this, to ask why something works and question it, not let it become a norm.

The word queer, for you: a word that can cover many things. How do you see this word working in the work you do, in terms of how you work? Has it changed, for you?

So, in the past, I approached this very academically. I was really into queer theory through my studies. And there is the way the word is used within the conduct of our society, in everyday life, which is – usually – to talk of people who are not “straight”, sexually. For me, the word relates more to the way the world works, or is structured to work, and how we exist outside of this. To break the mould of how society is supposed to function. Which means it is a term that constantly changes. Because society keeps on changing. What was queer ten years ago may be very normative today.

It’s often used very cynically and can become almost invisible: I wonder if the people reading a funding document, say, ever recognise what a word like queer represents?

I find it to be a very dynamic term. In the context of my work it’s relevant because it can help question what we know, or why we know things, in the ways they are presented to us.

It’s a very muscular word, in that regard then? A propulsive word.

There is a compulsion almost to it, true. It can be intense in the sense that it doesn’t let you rest, if you get too much into it – I have had this experience. I think of it as less propulsive and more elusive. It gets into all the cracks in what we know and tries to go in them and expand in there.

You mentioned the word mosaic earlier – an ancient word – what do you see as a mosaic?

To return to the notion of complexity again, we are now living in very complex societies – definitely culturally, and financially, and also in a city like Rotterdam, with very multicultural societies, in terms of ethnicities and traditions, or walks of life. But when they come together, you see something different maybe. You see a picture from all these different parts. You can not necessarily put all this together as one definite whole – you can’t merge all of these things for people in Rotterdam – but if you decide to look at this from certain vantage points, you definitely see a picture. And that’s the mosaic.

OK: How would you define the Salon of Queer Indoctrinations?

The elevator pitch! What I am bad at! I can’t condense things – but it’s a space where performance and curious audiences come together to think and feel collectively. There is a softness to the approach and it’s more about expanding curiosity and perpetuating it, than finding answers.

Elio’s Instagram can be found here. https://www.instagram.com/st.elio.s/

A quick summary of the Salon with images from past editions can be found here.