Queer Assemblages, Queer Survival. Ruminations On Soft Utopia

What would a queer utopia look like? Iranian multidisciplinary artist, activist, feminist educator, and former human rights lawyer Aytak Dibavar searches for a space, a ‘there and then’: ‘In every queer assemblage, space is charged — haunted, tender, defiant.’

I dream of a soft utopia where queer futurity is not simply a path on a progressive linear temporality but a flashing moment from the past and present. Soft utopia, a moment in time that holds capacity for both joy and grief, a reverberant memory from the past or a flashing moment of joy in the present. ‘Utopia’ is not synonymous with ‘future’, at least not a future understood through linear temporality.

My soft utopia exists in a there and then, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of it in a here and now — in collective queer assemblages.

Born from the solitude of isolation, queer assemblages have emerged as vital sanctuaries for bodies relegated to the peripheries — a realm where power decides what is seen and what is forever consigned to darkness. In the intricate dance of space and time, every surface and shadow carry the weight of history, culture and intimate human connection. Space is not merely a dimension; it is a living tapestry, woven by the movements and memories of its inhabitants — a convergence of identities, exclusions and power where becoming unfolds.

Space, time and mattering entwine — a trinity where becoming takes shape.

Within this tapestry, mattering transcends the physical. It blooms in communal interactions, transforming a neutral backdrop into a charged stage of resistance and refusal. Indeed, space is never neutral. It is assembled through the bodies that move through it — through gestures, silences, gazes, refusals.

It is not an empty container, but a constellation of social relations, shaped by histories, culture and the intimate texture of time. The meaning of space lies not just in its architecture but in its phenomenology — in how it is lived, sensed, inhabited.

Space, time and mattering entwine — a trinity where becoming takes shape.

Here, identities are negotiated. Exclusions are enforced. Power is felt in the bones.

Assemblages make space matter.

They transform bare walls into sanctuaries, silence into communion, invisibility into presence.
In every queer assemblage, space is charged — haunted, tender, defiant.

This is no less true in a theocratic state like Iran, where every aspect of public life is tightly controlled. There, queer spaces are not granted — they are carved out, clandestine, life giving.
They sustain us in the face of queer death, in defiance of erasure.

‘There are no homosexuals in Iran’, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared from a Western stage.

But hours later, our bodies found one another in familiar corners.
A cigarette between fingers, we sit in shared silence. No words needed.
Only the quiet affirmation of being — here, together — in a space that denies our very existence.

And yet we persist.

We know; queers take care of queers, because no one else will.

In the lingering smoke, in the unspoken care, in the lift of a teacup or cigarette — a silent toast to chosen family.
An underground current — soft, steady — flows beneath the visible world, forming the fragile grounds of our queer utopia.

We nod in bitter appreciation.

We know; queers take care of queers, because no one else will.
Our survival is a collective labour — tender, exhausting, sacred.

Here, we exist in a paradox, at once visible and hidden, present and unrecognised — a state in which our survival is etched into the very traces we leave behind.

We live in a double blind.

It is a hot day. I enter the café, scanning the room for her gaze, but she has not yet arrived. I sit and wait.
The barista catches my eye and waves. ‘The usual?’ he asks.
I nod and smile. He smiles back and turns to make my tea, his chest tilting slightly forward, one shoulder dipping with casual flamboyance. This is not just posture — it is a sense of freedom to express who he is in this space, a quiet performance of attentiveness, both generous and self-aware.

‘There she is,’ I say aloud without meaning to, the words slipping out as she walks in.
For a moment I hesitate — should I get up? Should I wait for her to come to me? But I cannot help myself. I rise, arms open.
Her brown eyes meet mine, and pain rushes back in like heat through glass. She does not return the embrace. She sits down without touching me.

This is not living. Not when outside the boundaries of bedrooms or this café, we are someone else entirely.

‘I told you I didn’t want to meet here again. Why did you ask me to come?’ Her voice is edged with annoyance.
Here is the only place I feel seen, I want to say. But I look into her eyes and lose the words. The distance there is so vast, it erases everything I had rehearsed.

‘You’re allowed to be scared. But please ... don’t deny who you are. Who we are,’ I plead, though even my voice sounds already defeated.

She is slipping away. They are winning again.

I reach out to take her hands. She tucks them beneath her legs and pulls her chair back.
Her voice starts to unravel into fragments: ‘Can’t. Won’t. Ruin. Normal. Life. Family. Husband. Future. Children. Can’t. Won’t. Death.’

She leaves.

Outside this café, we are erased.

And I stay — left tracing the outline of her absence across the last three years, wondering what I could have done to stop her fall.
Maybe she is right. This is not living. Not when outside the boundaries of bedrooms or this café, we are someone else entirely. Not when we live doubled — halved — hiding the parts of ourselves without which living is just breathing.
No one knows who we are.
No one knows we exist.
Except … us?

The barista gently taps me on my shoulder. I lift my head to meet his worried eyes.
He hands me a bunch of napkins.
‘I’m closing’, he says softly, ‘but stay as long as you need.’

The knowing — that only exists in us.
The knowing that tells us we do not exist outside this space.
That outside this café, we are erased.

A regime that denies our existence legislates our death.
So which is it? Do we exist, or are we condemned to death because we exist?
We live in a double bind: visible and invisible, present and absent, punished simply for the possibility of our being.
We linger in the shadows — not only for concealment, but for survival.
And in these shadows, queer assemblages draw their contours.
They live in the echoes, the residue, the traces left behind.

Who, then, claims our queer bodies? The answer is found in the imprints of our collective gatherings and in the unyielding duality of our existences, forever negotiating a space that refuses to acknowledge our names.

Who owns our queer bodies? The traces of our assemblages and the dual banality of our present, where we are denied the right to name our existence?

Who has the power to define us for us?
What is the weight of a life lived in a state of sanctioned unknowing?

Caught between imperialism and religious dictatorship, we live under the crush of history, the violence of the present.
Still, we imagine.
Still, we resist.

What is the weight of a life lived in a state of sanctioned unknowing?

What does it mean to invoke imagination as resistance?
To reject the linear logics of time, of narrative, of state-sanctioned reality?
To reach, with longing, towards what José Esteban Muñoz called a then and there — beyond the prison of the here and now.

How do we imagine a soft utopia?
One where our bodies do not bend under the weight of White supremacist, cis-heteronormative violence.
Where we do not inherit shame from godheads we did not choose.
A time not of mere survival, but of love.
Of care.
Of desire.

Of life fully lived.

The next morning, I return to the café even though I know she will not be there. I sit at the same table, as always. The sunlight cuts through the window, casting soft gold over the empty chair across from me — a chair where she used to sit and stare into my soul.

It is too beautiful a light for this kind of mourning.

I imagine her hands there, wrapped around a mug she drank her tea from, her mouth forming the words that told me we matter. The barista does not ask this time — he just brings the tea and places it down gently, winks and leaves me and my imagination be.

I practise forgetting her face in pieces.

Around me, the world moves on: spoons clink against glass, someone laughs too loudly, a queer couple kisses at the corner seat. I stay quiet, letting my pain dissolve gently into the joy of others — held, for a moment, in the warmth of this secret queer space, our only haven in the sprawl of this vast city.

I practise forgetting her face in pieces — the line of her jaw, the freckle near her eye, the way she used to look down before saying something that mattered. And the promises she made that shattered under the weight of theocracy and queerphobia.

How do you let go of someone who was never yours in daylight?

This contribution was originally published in Trigger 6: Assemblies (October 2025), the first volume in Trigger’s new annual book series by FOMU – Museum of Photography (Antwerp), guest-edited by Taous Dahmani in collaboration with FOMU editor Tom Viaene. Known for her critical focus on political photography in the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa), she foregrounds voices that resist reduction to narratives of violence or victimhood. Assemblies explores how gathering—whether in protest, ritual, or print—remains a precarious yet vital act, asking what it means to assemble when gathering itself has become a radical gesture of solidarity and imagination. Bringing together photography, personal essays, and archival material, Assemblies redefines what collectivity can mean today and tomorrow.

About Trigger: A publication from FOMU for critical reflection on/through photography—uniting artists, writers, scholars, and practitioners to challenge narratives and amplify overlooked perspectives.