¬ Lyónn Wolf

For the Berlin edition, Wolf reimagines Dublin’s former Ballymun Towers—a demolished modernist social housing project—as sites of queer, working-class resilience. By connecting imaginary utopias, as well as historical queer figures, such as modernist designer-architect Eileen Gray, with the Ballymun Community Library’s archive, the project uncovers hidden histories and stories of activism, solidarity, and neighbourhood alliances that have been erased by urban development and structural classism. Wolf sounds out these narratives, lost and speculative, proposing a new vision of queer utopianism rooted in everyday life. Through a new sound work with performers Pêdra Costa, Transboy Dom and Line Skywalker Karlström – coproduced by Gossip Gossip Gossip and Scriptings – Wolf constructs a space where these unrealized, concealed and forgotten stories are reactivated, imagining a future, in which queer and trans identity, as well as working-class heritage, flourish together.

Wolf’s artistic practice is rooted in an insistence on the transformative power of solidarity, friendship, and collective work. Bringing a decolonial, queer, trans and working-class perspective proposing an urgent (collective) rethinking of normativity, their work is a challenge to the margins, where too many important stories and perspectives remain silenced. "Domestic Optimism III – A Lesbian Squat Isn’t Just for Pornos" realigns the stigmatized image of the Ballymun Flats, transforming it into a space for critical yet joyful speculation—imagining a future where working-class heritage and queer community thrive in opposition to capitalist erasure. Drawing connections between Ballymun’s high-rise architecture, Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, and Eileen Gray’s modernist designs, Wolf reclaims these aesthetics for a messy, abundant vision of an always already flawed utopia. Ultimately, Wolf is asking: what could working-class architectural heritage look like when seen through the eyes of queer resistance and collective optimism?