Sandro Weilenmann’s essay ‘In Close Quarters: Archival Reimaginations Between Absence and Abundance’, has been published in the journal Invisible Culture: A Journal for Visual Culture. The essay appears in the journal’s 40th issue, which has a thematic focus on ‘Diffraction’.
The essay is available open access, and can be read here.
[Image credit: Jyoti Mistry, Loving in Between, 2023, video, colour, b/w, 18 min.]
We are delighted to announce the publication of Field Notes on Artistic Participation in Europe’s Trans and Queer Archives. This book is the first major Perverse Collections publication, and has been authored by Eliza Steinbock and Sandro Weilenmann.
Field Notes on Artistic Participation in Europe’s Trans and Queer Archives is a study of how contemporary artists access, question, and contribute to archival holdings. Resulting from two years of research into emerging LGBTQI+ archives across European countries, the book shines a light on the dynamics and potentials of creative strategies. How does it actually work out when artists get involved in archives? And what are the pitfalls and promises that need to be negotiated? Drawing on field visits and interviews with artists, community organisers, and archivists, the book offers provisional guidance to the challenges arising from artist-archive collaborations, stressing communication and mutual awareness.
The book is available Open Access: please access a copy here.
There will be an online launch for the book on 13 March 2026 at 3pm (GMT) / 4pm (CET). Please sign up for the launch here – we hope to see you there!
On 26 & 27 November 2025, PERCOL will be taking part in the JPICH dissemination event ‘Transnational Research for a Wider Impac.’ The event will take place in person at the Chateau de Versailles, France, but will also be streamed online.
You can find the whole programme for the event, and register to attend in person or virtually, here.
Publication announcement!
Eliza Steinbock’s essay “I”M STAYING WITH YOU: Archival Bequeathments in Trans Media Cultures” has just been published in the new issue of the journal PUBLIC: Art, Culture, Ideas. You can access the essay here.
Here’s the abstract for the essay:
‘The misinformation campaign that claims transgender people “don’t exist” correlates to the erasure and neglect of trans history and heritage in national, institutional, and community archives worldwide. What kinds of archival and artistic sources provide evidence of the plenitude of trans lives? Artistic experiments with historical documents and records but also gossip and ephemera signals a productive and transformative form of engagement that highlights the malleability and multiplicity of the archival evidentiary paradigm. How do artists interpret and take up such bequeathed heritage? Analyzing the replay and recreation of audio-visual records in Dear Lou Sullivan (Rhys Ernst, 2014) and I’m Staying (Holly Revell & Travis Alabanza, 2019) I look to how these “artchival objects” concentrate and facilitate intergeneration transmission and (dis)identification. I argue that archival bequeathment is not unidirectional – a donor to the archive – but also involves the artist’s acknowledgement of the gift.’
Check it out!
The third episode of our Podcast series, PERCOL Talks, is now available! The interview features E-J Scott, of the Museum of Transology, in conversation with Sandro Weilenmann.
Listen HERE.
The full programme for our conference in Valencia is now available online – you can access it here. ‘Revolver la memoria queer y trans: contarchivos y periferias’ – the final major PERCOL conference – will be held 21-23 May 2025.
The event opens with a session on 21 May at El Punt (please sign up for this here or via the link on the programme).
The main bulk of the conference, on 22 and 23 May, will be held at Centre Cultural La Nau. Registration for the main conference can be done here, or via the link at the end of the programme.
Hope to see you there!
If you weren’t able to make it to our workshop in Madrid in June 2024 – ‘Queer Memory and the Politics of the Archive’ – then we have good news. Our amazing hosts, Museo Reina Sofia, recorded the whole thing and have now made the video files available on their website. It’s in five chunks, matching the structure of the event; you can find the whole thing here.
The panel conversations were focused on (1) audiovisual archives, (2) militant archives, (3) dispersed, migrant, virtual archives, (4) queer traces in other archives, and (5) collective memory and archival technologies. Please note: the discussions were largely in Spanish!
At the end of the two day PERCOL workshop ‘Difficult Objects/Difficult Heritage’ – inspired by E-J Scott’s deft way with a slogan – the assembled group of attendees were invited to write their own slogans. These were supposed to address issues raised by the event (what do we do with challenging aspects of queer heritage?), in ten words or fewer. We thought you might like to see some of the results…
The second episode of the PERCOL Talks podcast is now live! The episode features our own Sandro Weilenmann in conversation with Richard Sandell, Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. The episode can be found here.
NEMO (the Network of European Museum Organisations) has just launched ‘LGBTQIA+ inclusion in European museums – An incomplete guideline.’ This fantastic document aims “to support institutions in becoming more inclusive spaces for everyone.” Eliza Steinbock and Sandro Weilenmann from the Perverse Collections project were amongst the array of people consulted in the writing of the guideline.
The NEMO document can be read and downloaded for free here.