A performance about queering the archive and queer contextualization.
Queer2Me is a performance created within the frame of the Art in the Archive Bursary from the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London. I had been working with curator Brenda Mado Guesnet on a research project, which culminated in a two-day event series and installation at The Showroom (London), titled Cybernetic Resistance (11-12 November 2016). We combed through a high volume of largely uncategorized archival material (slides, clippings, donated ephemera, etc.) over a period of months, and found a variety of perspectives on women’s lives and experiences as artists. However, I had missed overt queerness in the women’s artwork that we had contact with. This repeats a pattern of erasure in the world at large and in feminist spaces in particular, where queerness is sublimated, and overtness about the specificity of such experiences (amongst others) is seen as damaging to the cohesion of ‘women’ as a political group.
The performance took place over a Skype call, in which I encountered and described material from the archive in real time, seeking to make clear the queerness I read into specific materials, whether the author/donor intended these connections to be made or not.
A recording of the performance can be viewed in full at queer2me.net.
The archival web page for the Cybernetic Resistance project and additional materials related to the project can be found at CybRes.net.
