Dylberizm started in 2018, founded in Kosovo by two queer activists who began building a volunteer-based platform for queer storytelling and political education in Albanian. At the time, there was no queer media in the language they speak, so they translated materials, and published queer stories in their mother tongue, but they were active in other fields, responding publicly to homophobic attacks from politicians and public figures, organising street actions and protests, and initiating boycott campaigns against actors spreading anti-queer hate. The platform grew through collective effort and the urgency of people who needed a space to meet and fight in a context where heteronormativity runs deep. In 2023, after years of informal organising and expansion, they registered as an organisation to sustain and deepen the work.
Today, Dylberizm is a queer movement space that brings together narrative work, political education, cultural organising, research, and community building. Their work challenges the systems that structure everyday life in Kosovo, namely the patriarchy, nationalism, and the institutional silence that upkeeps them. Seeing visibility as an act of political warfare, this crew pushes the envelope on mainstreaming queer storytelling in their own language to counter the forces that try to erase or frame them as foreign. They exist because queer people in Kosovo are still denied basic recognition in schools, media, and public life, with many growing up without language, representation, or protection.
Their collective is composed of queer activists, cultural workers, and researchers, with a core team of six people holding the daily work across media, advocacy, research, cultural programming, communications, and community engagement. Their wider network of volunteers, collaborators, and allies contribute their labour, time, and skills to sustain this work. Seeing their fight as inseparable from other causes, their allyship efforts span far beyond queer activism: they build resistance in the streets, protest spaces, or cultural events. In Kosovo, they are part of the Anti-Capitalist Assembly, where they have co-organised May Day protests and other collective actions against exploitation, privatization, and economic violence. This space keeps the link between the class and queer struggle visible and non-negotiable, refusing the separation of economic injustice from gender and sexual oppression. They are also part of the Queer Coalition for Palestine and are co-organisers of Queer Cinema for Palestine since 2021, aligning their work with movements that understand queer liberation as inseparable from the struggle against occupation, apartheid, and global systems of violence.
The Guerrilla Redistribution
The money supported them to bring CHOKE HOLE to the Prishtina Queer Festival, a queer wrestling and drag performance project that fuses camp aesthetics with the physicality of WWE-style wrestling, using humor, irreverence, and political satire to push back against contemporary power structures and queer erasure. It is proof that queers not only bash back, they also backflip. Besides, the money also supported the realisation of ad hoc, grassroots queer actions throughout the year that are intentionally radical, urgent, and often outside the scope of institutional funding, including experimental public interventions and rapid-response cultural activism.
