We see The Underbelli as a platform for circulating our mad, queer, sex-working research and designs in the form of zines, audio content, study guides, politicized fashion/accessories and talk events.
The Underbelli was conceived as a project in 2017 when three of us desired to put our heads together for some reflections on political life in Minneapolis. We started as “Belli Research Institute” (a title that we found became too confusing in its appropriation of legitimacy). Our first collaboration was our petite satire: A Field Guide to the Protest Marshal. Since then we have continued to commune and create: a circle of little animals, rotating, evolving and supporting each other’s endeavors.
We strive to turn the harmful impressions left by things like trauma, policing, whiteness, settler colonialism and work – as they move through us – into something constructive and helpful. Our work has so far evolved to focus on madness, health, history, politics, memory, sex work and policing — with a commitment to tedious research both outside of academia and taking what we can from it to break knowledge out of ivory towers and pay walls. Most of all we are guided by our curiosities, experiences, emotions, and desires.
We believe that the more creative ways we find to survive, the more sensitivities that we cultivate, and the more that we allow for multiplicities of experience – the less that we will be bound by the toxicity and violent erasure of the everyday.
We strive to wield memory like a weapon in this hostile terrain of forgetfulness. Let us dance for you as we hold séances for the the unseen and the unheard.
Love,
The Underbelli
Get in touch: theunderbelli@riseup.net
THE UNDERBELLI 