The Perverse Collections project launched at the Bishopsgate Institute in London (one of our project partners) on 20 June 2023. The launch took the form of a panel discussion, chaired by Project Leader Glyn Davis. The event was sold out and the room was packed. The 90 minutes of the event swiftly evaporated, and our wonderful hosts had to politely usher us from the building!
The event had the title ‘Queer and Trans Archives: Safeguarding Histories, Designing Futures’, and covered a lot of ground. Three guest speakers discussed their experiences of working with queer and trans archival materials. Tone Hellesund was the initiator and founder of the Norwegian queer archive, Skeivt arkiv (another of our partners). She talked about setting up this collection, and about its relationship to nationality. (Tone currently runs the amazing QUEERDOM project – check it out.) Julian Isenia (University of Amsterdam) talked about the founding of the Black Queer Archive (again, a partner), and about the challenges of bringing Blackness and queerness together in the archive. Finally, Elahe Haschemi Yekani (one of our project board members) talked about the project Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary: Aesthetics, Affects, Archives, and about the complex relationships between archives, colonialism, and (im)migration.