Inspired by the late 1960s utopian builders’ guide A Whole Earth Catalog, QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival presents a forum for queer do-it-yourself culture and alternative world making.

QIY is envisioned as a laboratory for creating a sustainable queer culture and demonstrating the power of self and community organizing, re-creation, speculation, and transformation. As an antidote to anti-sociality theories of queerness (that suggest queerness can only be rendered as a negation of heteronormativity), Queer It Yourself invites artists to forge their own tools for surviving the everyday challenges of contemporary queer existence.

The exhibition is built around artists’ workstations, participatory spaces, hands-on training sites, maps, and user-friendly art that uses immersive and interactive experiences to demonstrate the idea of art as a tool, as having active agency within the totality of a meaningful lived world.

The QIY curators have queered the index of the original “Whole Earth Catalog” and adapted its thoughtful and useful categories to frame our own QIY space.