ABSTRACT
Chapter 12 details the journey of queer desire across a series of texts and sites in Belgrade, Serbia. It aims to query the various spatial constellations in which queer desire and the critique of urbanity come together by looking at the transformation of fiction into theory, and a city into a fiction. It details a project that developed over several years in a series of textual, visual and spatial interventions and the way it grew out of theoretical engagements with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
“Unidentified emotional object” started its journey as a text derived from a personal experience, queer in content and form. It was subsequently transformed into a piece of speculative fiction and given body through a series of interventions and across a number of media (graffiti, photography, architecture). Eventually, what had started off as an intimate act of committing desire to paper had, by the end of the process, become a matter of inscribing romantic affectivity and sexual desire onto a series of urban sites of Belgrade’s Savamala district, itself a site of political contestation. The end result, sited on the walls of a refugee centre, simultaneously resonated with, subverted and fell short of addressing the collective politics of desire.
