meet the artists

Welcome to the creative heart of Queertropolis.

Here, the boundaries between the personal, the political, and the physical dissolve. This digital directory brings together an international collective of contemporary artists, makers, and practitioners navigating the fluid landscapes of queer existence. Through a diverse range of media, from sustainable textiles and kinetic metal sculptures to radical zines, subverted traditional crafts, and raw performance art, each contributor maps out their own sanctuary of resistance, intimacy, and resilience.

the artists of the Treehouse community

Babet Klaassen (Haus of Trout) is an Amsterdam-based fashion designer, textile artist, and photographer whose practice explores the multifaceted dimensions of queerness and eccentricity. Under the moniker Haus of Trout, her work merges photography and textile art to question social positioning and identity. For Queertropolis, she presents Urban Seamonsters, a project that reimagines queer individu0als as mythological sea creatures to explore themes of alienation and societal displacement.

Pronouns: She/her

Rika Maja Duevel is an award-winning painter, performance artist, and curator from Stavanger, Norway, whose perspective as a global nomad informs her creative practice. Rooted in an introverted exploration of the female experience, her paintings incorporate figures inspired by Norwegian Bronze Age carvings to serve as visual narrators. For Queertropolis, she presents The Pieces of the Journey, a mixed-media acrylic painting series and custom pins that celebrate the personal resilience, care, and safety required to navigate life's beautiful and rough moments.

Pronouns: She/her

Rucha Kulkarni is an Amsterdam-based visual artist and social art practitioner whose work spans painting, textiles, and site-specific installations. Drawing from traditional Indian Godhari quilting techniques and feminist pedagogy, her practice employs interactive "quilt talk" methodologies to examine collective authorship, gendered labor, and migration under global capitalism. For this exhibition, she features The Balancing Act, a layered textile work composed of reclaimed fabrics, silk thread, and sublimation prints that functions as a queer metaphor for fluid, ongoing self-negotiation.

Pronouns: She/her

Cristina Iordache (Agga Concept) is a Romanian metal artist, now based in Amsterdam, who moves intuitively between organic jewelry design and small kinetic sculpture under the alias agga concept. Drawing inspiration from soft textures and fluid forms found in nature, her practice transforms rigid metals into poetic pieces embedded with personal memory. For this exhibition, she features Fluid Horizons, a two-meter-long kinetic metal tunnel composed of swaying, organic sculptures that invite viewers to reflect on the evolving and inclusive nature of the queer community.

Pronouns: She/her

Robert Beekelaar is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice blends photography, analog prints, illustration, and 3D animation. Under the alias Colugo he also works as a tattoo artist. For this exhibition he features a series of ink drawings focusing on diverse body types and shapes. The project emerges as a critical response to body shaming dynamics sometimes present even within the queer community, reclaiming the necessity of celebrating queerness across all bodies beyond a select group that fits mainstream imagery.

Pronouns: He/him

Raffaella Allegra is an Amsterdam-based conceptual and visual artist graduated from the Fotoacademie. Her multidisciplinary practice sits at the intersection of visual art, social reflection, and environmental awareness, using staged photography and theatrical set designs to explore overconsumption. For Queertropolis, she features RAVAGE, a project transforming domestic waste into a seductive yet unsettling visual language borrowed from fashion and advertising. Confronting the destructive impact of patriarchal structures on nature, her works demonstrate sustainability and ecological care as a profound concern of the queer movement.

Together with dancer and choreographer Sophie Gisbertz Raffaella is further developing the work into an immersive experience through movement, theatricality and live installations. In 2026, they founded the interdisciplinary artist collective The Goods We Made to strengthen their ongoing collaboration.

Pronouns: (Allegra) She/her - (Gisbertz) She/her

Gabriele Bonomi is an Italian contemporary mixed-media artist, based in Amsterdam, and curator whose multidisciplinary practice bridges sustainable visual arts and ecological research. Utilizing a diverse array of organic components, eco-printed textiles, and upcycled or reclaimed materials, Bonomi creates site-specific installations, sculptures, and tactile works that investigate identity, memory, and sensory transformation. His practice centers on the porous boundaries between the organic and the artificial, redefining materials to explore creative resilience and community engagement.

Pronouns: He/him

Marcia (Arte Boa) is a passionate art educator and artist with over twelve years of teaching experience, specializing in the field of upcycled art. As the founder of the creative studio Arte Boa, her practice focuses on transforming waste into wonder through accessible, impactful, and community-engaged workshops that foster creative self-expression. For Queertropolis, she presents Madiba, a limited-edition series of ten signed and numbered graphic works carved entirely from leftover pieces of salvaged hardboard, merging sustainable design with fine printmaking.

Pronouns: She/her

María Escarpenter is a Spanish multidisciplinary artist and performer based in Amsterdam, holding a degree in Fine Arts and Graphic Design from TAI in Madrid. Their practice utilizes storytelling and live performance to establish safe spaces of vulnerability, navigating identity and the rigid social structures of the gender binary. For this exhibition, they present a suspended watercolor self-portrait framed in gold, positioned between anatomical symbols to critique assigned binary identities and reflect on their personal transition toward a neutral legal name.

Pronouns: They/them - She/her

Tom Veldkamp is a multidisciplinary artist and tattooist whose practice thrives on the element of surprise, utilizing drawing, tattooing, and crochet to challenge conventional expectations. Subverting traditional craft mediums, his work began by countering typical crochet tropes with handmade yarn adult toys and harnesses. His practice has since evolved into creating detailed tapestries that explore diverse subjects while consistently retaining an unapologetic, kinky thematic lens that questions the boundaries of domestic craft.

Pronouns: He/him

Bruna Souza is a Brazilian-born multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer whose practice spans mixed-media installation, video, photography, illustration, and community-engaged projects. Drawing on found objects, archives, and holographic textures, her work explores individual and collective identities, freedom of self-expression, and socio-cultural reflection. Through her creative research, Souza investigates existentialism and our inner worlds while critically examining environmental consciousness and challenging the systemic, political, and social structures we build for ourselves.

Pronouns: She/her

Other international artists

Cat Moran (Meat_daughter) is a writer and independent zine maker. She publishes the zine Meat_daughter, a project featuring short stories, poetry, photography, and collage. Through the combination of textual and viscerally layered visual fragments, Moran’s work explores the territories of the queer macabre, deconstructing and reshaping narratives of identity, memory, and the uncanny.

Pronouns: She/her

Christopher Kale is an Amsterdam-based professional Renaissance and Medieval singer, teacher, and textile artist. His intricate textile works use experimental modifications of traditional techniques, a process that begins with hand-painting fabrics, dyeing fibers, and hand-spinning his own threads to explore subtle shifts in texture and color. For this exhibition, he presents Observations of the Unnatural World (numbers 4 and 5), featuring hand-spun silk threads on hand-dyed fabrics that celebrate the resilience and uninvited beauty of small organisms persisting through urban environments.

Pronouns: He/him

Alda Lilja is an Icelandic-born illustrator and ceramic artist based in Amsterdam and a graduate of Arts University Bournemouth. Their practice translates whimsical, two-dimensional figurative illustrations into three-dimensional earthenware sculptures that explore the human experience through the lens of neurodivergence and queerness. For Queertropolis, they present Soft Touch, a partially unglazed ceramic sculpture depicting two lovers fused in an eternal hug. Crafted from salmon and terracotta clays and tattooed with natural motifs, the piece utilizes texture and earthiness to symbolize the deep, expansive nature of queer love and intimacy.

Pronouns: They/She

Lis Walter is a 27-year-old non-binary multimedia artist from Kassel, Germany, specializing in comic illustration and film. Their intimate and evocative works primarily center on queer relationships, emotional landscapes, and sexuality. For Queertropolis, they present Where would you like to fuck?, an intermedial installation comprising a risoprinted zine, mesh posters, and drawings that critique the historical absence of safe, public cruising spaces for lesbian and dyke communities while dreaming of future queer architectures of desire.

Pronouns: They/them

Chiara Fehling and Thalea Albrecht are Kassel-based visual artists who first collaborated through the drag collective Samt und Seuche. Their shared practice utilizes performative interventions to map out underground utopias of trans and queer existence. For Queertropolis, they present trans|action 1 PM, a participatory installation featuring photographic prints and a framing chain structure that captures a drag performance inside a local adult movie theater, confronting themes of cruising, queer trauma, male gaze, and reclaiming bodily autonomy.

Pronouns: (Fehling) They/them - (Albrecht) He/she/they

Mon Graffito is a Mediterranean figurative outsider artist who has spent over four decades exploring the visual codes, signs, and subcultures of gay communities. Moving from traditional figurative representations toward fluid, symbolic depictions of gay male social spheres and activities, his work captures moments of desire and community. Based in Den Haag. For this exhibition, he presents Queer Sculpting, a series of small, intimate figurines and mobile sculptures that document moments in gay culture.

Pronouns: He/him/his/omg

Thalea Sascha Albrecht is a visual artist based in Kassel, Germany, working across performance, painting, and installation. Their work draws deeply from personal experience to challenge power relations and highlight social tensions surrounding the agender and queer body. For this exhibition, they present unter uns / Adam, an intermedial work pairing an oil painting on wood with an accompanying poem to explore the quiet, internalized nature of queer shame, religious guilt, and the domestic spheres of desire.

Pronouns: He/she/they

Pawlo Dubinin is a Ukrainian-Finnish queer painter and film director from Sumy, Ukraine. His painterly practice treats the medium as a metaphysical space, exploring themes of "teen angst," age transformation, occult magic, and the porous border between tenderness and violence. Rooted in countercultural and diaristic phenomena, his work addresses body dysmorphia, fetish aesthetics, and the objectifying male gaze. For Queertropolis, he features It was a long winter day in the studio, and your warmth kept me alive, a gouache on paper work that captures a raw moment of vulnerability, trust, and physical craving, subverting the model from a detached monument into a live, fragile presence looking back at the viewer.

Pronouns: He/him

And more to come...

Beyond our featured individual artists, Queertropolis will proudly host collective works and interventions by the visionaries at Atelier Brut and the There was a time before collective (created by MenAsWell). Full line-up and project updates are dropping very soon—stay tuned!

Gabriele Bonomi

Crafting connections through sustainable artistic experiences.

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