The Craft of Being Too Queer and Hybrid

The Craft of Being Too Queer and Hybrid' explores Mijali Posada Polydorides’s identity as a Mexican-Cypriot-Spanish designer, maker and performer through a queering methodology that reorients the materiality, techniques and functions of traditional crafts. Emerging from childhood rituals, memories and fascinations, the project uses nostalgic narratives as tools for reflection and transformation, positioning making as a site of play, subversion and reimagining. It challenges heteronormative conventions embedded in three traditional crafts: Mexican cartonería and piñata-making, Cypriot quilting and embroidery, and Asturian wood carving used for castanets.

The artefacts produced help orient individuals towards a sense of home, identity or community — especially for those whose experiences of belonging are hybrid, displaced or non-normative. Designed to be communally touched, played with and activated by performers and non-performers alike, the artefacts embrace failure and amateurism, reclaiming craft as a queer, collective and embodied act.