The talk is accessible on YouTube here.
Anne Potjans will give a talk on “Shameful Shame – Abjection, Agency, and Angry Black Women” at the workshop “Autobiographical Writing and the Gestalt of Shame: Disability, Chronic Illness and Mental Distress in Conetemporay Intersectional Life Storying,” organized by Prof. Dr. Katrin Röder.
Movements of a Dream Untold: Archivieren als künstlerische Praxis
Vortrag im Rahmen des festival contre le racisme 2023.
Wie können Geschichten marginalisierter queerer Communities für zukünftige Generationen archiviert werden? Kann “klassische” Archivarbeit mit dekolonialen Kämpfen verbunden werden? Ausgehend von diesen Fragen reflektiert Thao Ho über ihre Arbeit am Schwulen Museum & Archiv, Community-Organising in Berlin und das Potential künstlerischer Praxis als alternatives Archivieren an Hand deren fortlaufender Forschung zum Thema „Queer x Vietnam x Diaspora.“
Queer and Trans Archives: Safeguarding Histories, Designing Futures’ is the launch event of the ‘Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives’ project, which runs from June 2023 to May 2025. ‘Perverse Collections’ involves researchers based in the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, and is funded by JPICH. The project is led by Glyn Davis (University of St Andrews), working alongside Principal Investigators Eliza Steinbock (University of Maastricht) and Juan Antonio Suárez (University of Murcia). The central question the project asks is: how can a critical understanding of the evolution of Europe’s LGBTQ+ archives be used by scholars, queer and trans community members, and cultural heritage workers to forge sustainable tactics for protecting LGBTQ+ history? ‘Perverse Collections’ aims to transform practices of collecting and protecting queer and trans materials in ways which will have widespread implications for the cultural heritage sector as a whole.
Join us on 20 June 2023 for a roundtable discussion that will begin to explore these questions – and others. Taking part in the conversation will be three leading archivists and scholars from across Europe and Scandinavia: Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Tone Hellesund, and Wigbertson Julian Isenia. They will come together to share their experiences of working with queer and trans archival collections, including creating LGBTQ+ archives and deciding where to house them. The speakers will also unpack the ways in which queer and trans materials have value as portals into broader political concerns, revealing stories of public and private practices, of migration and exile, of community debate and conflict. Ultimately, the discussion will aim to identify potential ways in which queer and trans archives, across Europe and beyond, can be sustained for posterity.
Location: Bishopsgate Bishopsgate London United Kingdom
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2023 15:00 – 16:30 BST
More information here.
Thao Ho’s film that they co-directed celebrates its premiere as part of the program “Wir müssen reden“ / “We need to talk” as part of Deutschland-Fokus Labor der Gegenwart curated by Sarnt Utamachote. The screening is followed by a Q&A where Thao Ho talks about aesthetics of representation, the tensions of intergenerational storytelling, and collective filmmaking. More information here.
“We need to talk” is a phrase, an invitation to a moment of confrontation between two sides. But “we” could also mean a collective that wants to raise its voice. The short films in this program show the diversity of migration stories from the Asian continent to Germany. At the same time, they contradict the clear objective lines of narration that characterize colonial storytelling. Rather, the works are cinematic explorations of the intimacy of gendered storytelling (the tension between mother and father) and of an auto-ethnographic approach: of how the filmmakers position themselves “in” the story they tell.
