Flamingo Association was founded to promote contemporary forms of queer artistic expression, in order to affirm and valorize them in the regional culture and civil sector. We organize and produce events for the support and empowerment of citizens in accepting that their own sexual and gender identity as well as to achieve social visibility of gender variant identities and sexual practices.
In Zagreb, Croatia, there is currently no other organization that systematically deals with the presentation of queer culture, history and diversity of queer lifestyles through artistic content created by young artists, both within the queer community as well as those outside it. Queer cultural and artistic activities have been reduced to occasional visits from foreign artists, with a more or less pronounced exclusive character, with their queer components usually not articulated enough, but also not loudly and socially engaged. Flamingo is working to provide space for artistic affirmation of young people and social emancipation of the audience through fun, innovative and unusual program content.
Through its work, Flamingo systematically shows that queer art, or art created by the queer community exists and we encourage the community itself that it should be consumed and enjoyed. We also aim to createe new and strengthen existing queer identities in a fun way by providing a space where the audience will be able to reject the ideology of contemporary queer movement, which under the guise of promoting inclusiveness promotes exclusivity, political correctness and by doing so conditiones the formation of identity.
The vision of our association is that the arts and artistic content should be entertaining and educational, as much as it should be high and intellectual. Guided by that, we place the political and sexual in areas where they are not expected (areas of entertainment, clubbing etc.), which are historically inseparable from queer art forms. Flamingo is informally working from mid-2013 until the mid of 2014, when we formally registered as a non-profit association of citizens to promote queer culture and heritage. The current focus of the association is to strengthen local and regional drag performance scene. Association, and its artistic platform House of Flamingo functions as an inclusive space where all can come to create a fun scene and artistic content or participate in it as long as they share our ideals and values of inclusiveness. In this context, the involvement of artists, volunteers and the public is as much as they choose: from the consumption of content, its creation or participation in it for example by experimenting with their own identity in the events that HoF is organizing.