Queers on the Run: A Nomadic Workshop in Queer Archives in Canada with Drs. August Klintberg and Erin Silver
We invite students and interested community members to participate in Queers on the Run: A Nomadic Workshop in Queer Archives in Canada, an ongoing research experiment led by Drs. August Klintberg and Erin Silver.Where do queer Canadian art histories reside? What gathers/dwells in these repositories, what has been omitted and/or excluded, and how do institutions shape what histories can be known and accessed? Rarely a solo endeavour, queer art historical scholarship is more often relational and collaborative in nature. However, despite the wealth of queer Canadian art practices, the untraditional forms that queer scholarship assume may account for why no comprehensive history of queer Canadian art exists. Efforts through the 1970s to the 1990 to secure queer presence and visibility in a variety of institutional contexts became de facto political acts. However, queerness has a troubled, even “backward” (Heather Love, 2007) approach to archives and histories (Ann Cvetkovich, 2003; José Esteban Muñoz, 1996). We ask: how might queer archives engage self-reflexively with regard to the challenges of preserving oft-ephemeral queer histories while continuing to promote and safeguard their right to exist? Guided by the premise that museums, art institutions, collections, libraries, and archives are inextricable to art historical scholarship, we will examine the interrelation between institutions and the researching and writing of queer Canadian art histories. This workshop will include hands-on research into the periodicals collections in the BC Lesbian and Gay Archives, housed at the City of Vancouver Archives, with a focus on journalistic images within print media. Our objective is to experiment in collaborative research, bearing in mind the following questions: 1) What is a queer archival methodology?; 2) How does mentorship function outside the heternormative order?; and 3) What are the ethics of and protocols for uncovering and circulating traces of queer worldmaking?
Image Credit: Kelly Midori McCormick |