PUBLIC essay published!

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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 Artistic experiments with historical documents and records but also gossip and ephemera signals a productive and transformative form of engagement that highlights the malleability and multiplicity of the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!

PERCOL Talks Episode 3!

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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.

Valencia conference programme

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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!

Madrid workshop video files

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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!

Sloganeering

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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…

PERCOL Talks Episode 2!

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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 guidelines launched!

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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.

‘Blooming Archive’ pictures

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Have you been able to make it along to the ‘Blooming Archive’ exhibition curated by Sandro Weilenmann, which is currently on show on the 3rd floor of OBA in Amsterdam? Whether you have or not, here are some beautiful install pics, courtesy of Fabian Landewee.

‘Blooming Archive’ catalogue

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The PERCOL exhibition ‘Blooming Archive’ opened on the 3rd floor of OBA in Amsterdam on Thursday 3 October. The event was attended by around 150 people. The exhibition features work by seven different artists, and is open to the public (free entry!) until 3 November.

There is an accompanying catalogue to go with the exhibition, which can be picked up at OBA. A digital copy can be found here.

PERCOL X EUROPAEUM

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Europaeum is a network of eighteen leading European universities. Every summer, the network holds a summer school, which is hosted by one of the partners in the consortium. This year, the host is the University of St Andrews, and the theme of the event is ‘Marginalised Histories: Cultural Heritage and Archives’.

Taking place from 28-30 August 2024, PERCOL’s Glyn Davis is one of the organisers of the summer school, and will be delivering the opening keynote talk, ‘Cold Blooded Old Times: On the Chill of the Archive’. Other contributors to the summer school include some PERCOL friends and collaborators: Michael Nebeling Petersen, who is working on the cultural history of AIDS in Denmark; Gracia Trujillo, of Madrid Complutense University; and Tobias de Fonss Wung-Sung, of Copenhagen University (who made an amazing contribution to our Hands Off conference back in February).

We’ll be posting some images on Instagram!

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