REBELLIOUS ROT-MAKING — Queer Cinema of Decay

✦ Nov 15 [screening/discussion] REBELLIOUS ROT-MAKING — Queer Cinema and the Politics of Decay by Rizky Rahad & Alger Ji-Liang

co-presented by SILKWORMS & UNIT/PITT

6-10pm @ Atelier254

Pay-What-You-Can ticket available. Email us at admin@chapelsound.org

See the rest of the festival's programming HERE

In her essay Rot, Kyla Wazana Tompkins invites us to consider decomposition as a queer political practice: a way of confronting systems that organise life through hierarchies of purity, respectability, and value. Rot unsettles what has been declared dead, useless, or disposable, transforming it into the conditions for other life. What if queer cinema approached dominant culture in the same way?

Enter brainrot: the internet’s compulsive circulation of memes, absurdity, repetition, and algorithmic excess. Often associated with attention’s deterioration, brainrot also blurs the boundaries between meaningful and meaningless, productive and wasteful. Like rot, it reveals how cultural refuse might generate unexpected possibilities.

This programme brings queer aesthetics into contact with the structures that organise supposedly proper life: normative gender, respectable sexuality, the nuclear family, the nation, and the fantasy of linear social progress. Through camp, grotesque bodies, erotic transgression, excess, and narrative disintegration, the films turn what society considers deviant or abject into a site of critique and possibility. Their unruly forms might be understood as a kind of queer brainrot: infecting respectable culture with its own contradictions, looping through its fantasies, and refusing the demand to make sense, behave, or resolve neatly.

Rather than seeking inclusion in an intact social order, these works ask what happens when its foundations begin to rot. Decay here is not simply destruction, nor is suffering romanticised. It is a process through which the boundaries between purity and contamination, normality and deviance, life and death become unstable, and through which other forms of existence can take shape.

Bringing Indonesian and Canadian films into conversation, this programme takes up QAMERAD’s approach to cinema as a practice of “worldbuilding amidst the fire”: not only destroying dominant regimes that constrain queer life, but cultivating other ways of living together. Echoing Tompkins’ closing provocation, “Let us be the rot that decomposes disciplinarity; let us be critics sitting in the decay of history. Let us be the rot that survives.”

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “Rot.” Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. New York University Press, 2024: 131-172

---------

Rizky Rahad (he/him) is an Indonesian filmmaker, programmer, and researcher exploring queer cinema as ‘rebellious worldmaking’. Currently co-running cinema collective QAMERAD in Bali, Rizky’s latest film House of R3nc0ng chronicles survivors of anti-trans violence resisting surveillance, while his book QUEERS SHOOT BACK! imagines a liberatory queer cinema beyond neoliberal visibility politics. Rizky is a recipient of the 2026 Bertha Artivism Awards, 2025 Flaherty Fellowship, and 2024 British Council’s Connection Through Culture grant.

QAMERAD is a Bali-based queer cinema collective organising guerrilla screenings and community-led workshops. Viewing cinema as a tool for commoning, QAMERAD gathers communities to redistribute resources and imagine alternatives under regimes of surveillance and control, privileging opacity and radical aesthetics as strategies for collective survival and queer world-building.

Alger Ji-Liang 梁家傑 (he/him) is an emerging visual artist, curator, and DJ based in Vancouver on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His lens-based practice explores the interrelations of kinship, love, and grief through image-making, documentation, and archival investigation.

Alger is a VIFF Catalyst alum, has served on the screening committee of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, and is the former curator of the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen – a public billboard showcasing local and international moving image works. He is currently the associate curator and coordinator of Atelier254, a multi-use community space in Chinatown that supports marginalized and underrepresented artists and cultural producers in the city. Alger is the co-founder of SILKWORMS, an interdisciplinary and transcultural project that weaves people together through communal gatherings of film, music, and conversation.

SILKWORMS is an interdisciplinary project that weaves people together through communal gatherings of film, music, and conversation. Drawing from the Silk Road and the co-founders’ Sino-Mesopotamian ancestry, this project creates spaces for transcultural and diasporic exchange with the goal of defying singular histories, unwinding fixed narratives, and envisioning a collectively built future.

---------

We would like to acknowledge funding support from City of Vancouver, BC Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia, and Canada Council for the Arts. 💫 CONSTELLATION FESTIVAL 🌟 is a result of a two year cultural production mentorship program with Chapel Sound.

We acknowledge and are deeply thankful that this programming takes place on is the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.