We’re delighted to announce that the ‘Perverse Collections’ project team (most of us, anyway) will be presenting at the 2nd Global Audiovisual Archiving Conference in Toronto in July 2024.

As the Archive/Counterarchive team put it, “The biennial Global Audiovisual Archiving Conference is an opportunity for scholars, archivists, artists, curators, filmmakers, students, and film enthusiasts from across the world to gather and explore contemporary professional, artistic, and socio-political issues affecting audiovisual heritage today. The aim of the conference is to broaden the knowledge and connections within the global archival community, leading to new insights into the material and cultural resonances of archival approaches to sound and moving image in different parts of the world.”

The PERCOL panel has the title “Forging Connections: On the Mobility and Malleability of Europe’s LGBTQ+ Archives”. We’ll report back after the event itself!

My Evidence: Creating LGBTQI+ Art and Archives

Thursday 3 October and Friday 4 October, 2024, Amsterdam, at IHLIA LGBT Heritage (day 1) and Mediamatic (day 2)

What kinds of artistic and historical sources are circulated as evidence for trans and queer lives, and how should we evaluate the personal and creative dimensions of its presentation?

How can archives and art, or a mingled form of artchives, evidence the plenitude of queer and trans lives? Scholars in a wide variety of fields of study (queer, trans, disability, ‘race’/ethnicity), often from outside of the discipline of history, have seized on archival sources to locate ‘those of my kind.’ Artists have created their own records of existence and brought their aesthetic sensibilities to documenting historical and contemporary figures. Many of these efforts seem not so much about an attempted harking back to an affirmative, conflict-free past to claim “we’ve always been here”, but are rather geared towards opening up imaginative histories outside mainstream historiographical models.

The profuseness of artistic and literary experiments with trans and queer archives signals a productive and transformative form of engagement that highlights polyphony and conflict. How can these creative tactics change our understanding of LGBTQI+ history? In what ways might this shift to the creative and the personal seed transformative potential for cultural heritage politics and policy more broadly?

‘Perverse Collections’ (PERCOL) invites participants to explore these questions in an exchange-focused conference. The event intends to facilitate discussion between scholars, museum professionals, artists, archivists, activists, and other practitioners working with LGBTQI+ art and archives. Propositions, materials, and case studies related to the UK, European, and Scandinavian regions (including wider migration trajectories and diasporic communities) are especially welcome. We understand ‘Europe’ as a project but acknowledge how it operates as a place as well. Acclaimed trans historian Susan Stryker, who is on the PERCOL advisory board, is a confirmed speaker.

We invite you to propose a short presentation of your response to the following discussion topics. We anticipate forming roundtables around these topics that kick off with a series of 4-6 responses to enhance the ensuing exchange.

1. Ethical considerations when archives work with artists, and artists work with archives: what should be included in a care rider detailing conditions of engagement for the record, individual, and the organisation (based on your experience)?
2. Status of ‘evidence’ in various fields of study and institutional contexts: do we need to produce evidence of experience (and what kinds?) to show that we shouldn’t be persecuted, and how is this working to safeguard our lives?
3. The archive as a space of (un)belonging: in the face of widespread symbolic annihilation and epistemicide, who continues to be marginalised in LGBTQI+ archives and what is necessary to sustain their vulnerable lives and records?
4. Creating materials and (dis)identifying bodies, in circulation: how are the profusion of archiving and narrativisation practices, including their presentation and display tactics, changing cultural heritage politics and policy, and is the impact different for contemporary art spaces than physical archives?

Are you a skilled moderator and have expertise on one of these discussion topics? You can also propose yourself as a moderator for a roundtable.

How to submit a proposal: your proposal should include:

1. Name, affiliation/profession, email address
2. 200-word proposal for your response (indicate for which roundtable)
3. 50-word biography

Please submit your proposal in the body of an email, addressed to: [email protected]

1 May 2024 – submission deadline

1 June 2024 – notification of acceptance

1 July 2024 – provisional programme announced and registration opens

Limited bursaries are available for PhD students and precarious workers travelling to Amsterdam from the UK or Europe. Send an email with a description of your expected costs to [email protected]

‘My Evidence’ will be a free event, and vegetarian catering will be provided (other dietary options will be available).

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.