Margins For Error is a cultural programme running from 21st to 30th November 2025, in Johannesburg. Venues TBC.

This programme intends to celebrates the social impact of cultural work created by queer artists, writers and activists. Across Africa, queer organisations, authors, and publishers face persistent barriers to the distribution of their work, due to censorship, oppressive laws, and limited access to resources.

In November 2025, The Pan Africa Ilga (PAI) Conference will be hosted in Johannesburg. The conference is a regional convening of queer activists, organisers, grant-makers and community leaders from across Africa, who come together to consider strategies for building a more just and inclusive society. 

To coincide with this moment, GALA Queer Archive is hosting this satellite programme that highlights South Africa's queer arts and culture sector, and creates space for exchange and solidarity with our comrades across the continent.

Submit your films and publications in the forms below.

Applications close on the 21st of September 2025

Margins for Error acknowledges the vital role of the experimental, unfinished, and uncharted processes when chasing dreams of freedom and equality. The impact of creative production in socio-political movements is difficult to measure, yet we know that it holds a profound, transcendent power to move, affect, and inspire.

Designed as a space for queer creators and activists, Margins for Error fosters generative conversations responding to cultural production within and for queer communities. The programme encourages engagement with queer experiences, ideas, and aspirations through diverse creative processes.

The title of the programme gestures to the multiplicity of communities that it speaks to, the marginalised. It also considers the spaces where innovation and experimentation thrive despite ongoing neglect, as the artistic output produced by/for/about queer experiences tend to be made independently and with limited resources.

In quantitative research, absolute accuracy is understood to be unattainable. Thus, the margin of error represents the range where the truth is predicted to be found. In queer organising, our freedoms are measured by the laws, policies, or societal structures that support equal rights, yet we are too aware that the lived experiences rarely reflect those yardsticks. Margins For Error explores how cultural productions could be the uncertain range that represents a more genuine depiction of the queer communities’ experiences.

For any further enquiries,  email: galaarchives@gmail.com