Synopsis:

Queer Skate Club Amsterdam is a collective that creates a safe space for Queer people to come together & share the joy of community and skating. 

The club meets every Sunday at the Eye Film Museum - a central spot in Amsterdam - to skate, exchange skills, organise workshops and meet fellow queers. 

Photographers who are part of the collective continuously capture the energy, support and resilience of the beautiful people from our growing community. Whether dancing, making friends, learning tricks, sharing food or just laughing their hearts out - the energy every Sunday is one of love & support.

For the Utopia Expo, the photographers worked together to curate and emulate that feeling we all get every Sunday. The feeling that your identity is represented, that you have a community & that you will always be supported in facing the world. Within this space - we resist gender, sexual and societal binaries. These pictures hold a essence of Queer Utopia: a space to celebrate love, without limitations or expectations. A space, where we are all free to be and express ourselves in any and every way.

Bio: 

Julia van Hulst is a digital designer and photographer based in Amsterdam. Photographing with analogue minolta, her work is like a diary, documenting friends at parties in extravagant outfits juxtaposed with intimate moments with no glitter to hide behind. The Queer Skate Collective series is equally diary-like. Immersed in community every week both in front of, and behind the camera. 

Samira El Messaoudi (she/her) is an experienced designer based in the Hague that specializes in digital design. Samira was born and raised in the Netherlands. As the daughter of a migrant worker, she has always been aware of her position as a Moroccan female in the West. She tries to portray this diversity and empowerment in her creations. From digital products and sketches till photographs. Her love for skating and culture brought her to the Queer Skate Collective – Amsterdam where she tries to capture the love and openness she experienced in a series of photos.

Rima Baroud (they/them) is a creative, focusing on film photography and videography. Their passion mainly lies in capturing their immediate world through a socio-political and queer lensRima first started with editing home videos, putting together shaky footage and emotional song lyrics to create the perfect Mother’s Day project. This passion quickly turned into yearly projects, capturing their year in those “forgotten” moments. Rima studied Liberal Arts and Sciences with a major in humanities and a minor in journalism in their bachelors and went on to do their masters in New Media and Digital Culture. It was only after their masters that a friend gave them an analogue camera, pushing them to explore film photography. Exploring point-and-shoot, SLR camera’s and Super 8 film, Rima instantly fell in love with the feel of it.

The Queer Skate Club is where Rima really got to explore their passion for film photography, capturing queer identities in their most safe, happy and vulnerable moments. Their images hope to capture a feeling of familiarity - a sense of home and community.

Nour is a queer egyptian artist & designer exploring the intersection of culture, politics and emotion. With her work, she aims to facilitate spaces of safe self expression and develop an empathetic understanding of socio-political oppression. While she develops her career as an experience designer, photography is there to take her on adventures. Her camera is her companion in life; documenting those fleeting moments of freedom, love, and resistance.

Mara Lin Visser (they/them) is a visual anthropologist, food activist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. Film as a medium gives Mara Lin the freedom to explore and express their thoughts about various topics in a natural way. 

Mara Lin is part of the visual anthropological collective ethnovision, which aims to bridge the knowledge-gap between academics and a bigger audience using the power of audiovisual research methods. Currently, Mara Lin works at Cascoland and is setting up The Waste To Success, a collective which generates awareness around food waste, local and sustainable food by giving creative cooking workshops.

Skating (skateboarding and quad skating) started as a solitude activity in which they can move like they wanted and later evolved as one of their research topics. In the visual ethnography Roller Girls: Performance of Gender in the Roller Derby Community of Barcelona, Mara Lin, explores the gender diversity within the Barcelona Roller Derby community through performance, dress, movement and the body. Mara Lin is one of the organizers of the Queer skate club.