Gallery Talk: Weaving Herstory with the House of Hopelezz

Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos (GR), a.k.a Taka Taka, is the godmother of the drag House of Hopelezz, sister for others, mother of the drag king House of Løstbois, proud daughter of Jennifer Hopelezz and co-founder of the non-profit Drag King Academy Amsterdam. Taka Taka identifies as a dragtivist, educator, queer theorist and independent curator who produces performances as art director for the Amsterdam‘s sex positive underground night club, Church since 2013.

“Drag mothering has become a way of life for me. It is based on values such as collaboration,co-creation, free knowledge sharing, exchange of differentiations, friendship, dressing up and partying strategies for collective growth. I have experience being drag mothered within the specific realm of dragtivism that stands as an infrastructural proposition for underrepresented groups and their intersections. Body(ies) hold stories within them: complex systems of encounters and affects. We form drag houses based on our lived experiences. Drag houses are not meant to create a representative utopian future through social commentary, nor an alternative one. They do not institute a new reality, but our culture does.”

Taka Taka were trained as a professional make-up artist, studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie followed by Master in Arts at the Dutch Art Institute. Currently researching drag mothering as an artistic educational model together with DAS support PhD programme THIRD. Taka Taka sees drag as an amplified voice, whose purpose is to communicate, problematize and propose methods according to local conditions. They have shared their knowledge and methodologies for drag mothering, gendered character based practices and its intersections with HIV through interviews, lectures, essays and workshops with various Dutch and international art institutions and art academies. They collaborated annually with SOA/AIDS Nederland, Global Aids Village, and more. As well with their blood line mother Dimitra Panagiotakopoulou who is living in the Greek village Saravali and designing and knitting entire outfits for Taka's lectures and performances.

House of Hopelezz is the oldest drag house in The Netherlands initiated by Jennifer Hopelezz in 2003. We use Church and the party BLUE as our headquarters. It is a pluricultural para-family constellation of 35+ active members including transwomen, sex workers, HIV positive bodies, cis gay boys, non-binary people and gender bender performers. Some of our sisters and daughters come from performance and art backgrounds but most have no prior training. This house has produced at least twelve mothers and several other houses. The main focus is on a sex positive reality, HIV prevention and de stigmatization as well queer safety.