Mehmet Süzgün and António Manso Preto (Critical Studies, Sandberg Instituut) were selected through the Open Call by Public & Projects to take over the Pavilion of the Rietveld Academie one week in April 2026.
Mehmet Süzgün and António Manso Preto initiated the project I Will Again Become Your Special Comrade, where they transform the Pavilion into an exhibition-as-study-space, where they will be reimagining gay Marxist thought collectively within the contemporary moment.
---
You aren’t sure if he is comrade or a cumrade… I Will Again Become Your Special Comrade is an exhibition-as-study-space that brings together visual work, texts, and collective reading as a way of reimagining gay Marxist thought collectively within the contemporary moment. The exhibition and reading group approach the homo-Marxist tradition not as a historical doctrine, but as a set of desires, aesthetics, and political problems: collective life beyond the family, pleasure against productivity, intimacy against property, and the refusal of normalization. We’re all maybe a bit more gay than marxist or more marxist than gay, doesn’t really matter… Capital has actualized itself to assimilate all that opposes it; through a similar lens, we ask whether desire might or not be organized outside such assimilation.
To take Pasolini’s example: “To understand / that few know the passions / in which I’ve lived; that they’re / not brotherly to me, and yet / they are / my brothers because they have / passions of men / who, joyous, unknowing, whole, / live experiences / unknown to me.” Men become a reminder of the self’s own inadequacy as a man, while, at the same time, the object of desire may also be a possible comrade. Both positions are, even independently, rewarding. Desire thus produces an enlarged capacity, where time, politics, and identity orbit around a poetical praxis that affirms it. (Homosexualize urselves today!…).
Photos by Matija Stojanovic
Poster by Mehmet Süzgün and António Manso Preto