Radicals Between Trees and Dicks

Three-channel video and two-channel audio installation, 4K, colour, 36 min
2024

Trees hold what official records do not.

Radicals Between Trees and Dicks is structured in eleven acts and draws on seven stories of queer self-discovery, selected from a larger archive of approximately fifty testimonies gathered since 2019 across South Caucasus and Central Asia. Across three screens, five performers translate these accounts into gesture and movement, while altered voices protect the identities of those who shared them. The film does not reconstruct the encounters literally. Bodies appear, disappear and wait among trees; gestures pass between screens, creating a vocabulary of approach, hesitation, recognition and retreat. Parks, forests, riverbanks, public toilets and saunas emerge as informal architectures shaped by timing, repetition and shared codes. Trees become witnesses and accomplices within this landscape. They conceal bodies, mark meeting points and retain memory without exposing anyone. Moving between testimony, choreography and nocturnal landscape, the installation asks what kind of archive can exist when visibility itself may carry risk.

Produced during Abdullayev’s Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen Fellowship and first presented at Kunstpavillon Innsbruck in 2024, the work received the Golden Cube Award at Kassel Dokfest the same year.

Performed by Hugo Le Brigand, Sarra Nsir, Davide Stacchini, Moritz Wendler and Emile Wendt.

Sound by Farhad Farzali.