‘Archive This’ A blog by Olivia Sloss – Live & Digital Assistant

On Tuesday 16 – Wednesday 17 June this year, the Future Kin network gathered at LADA’s home, the Garrett Centre, in East London. This was the first of three international meetings of the network to discuss ideas around supporting queer performance practice, namely, creating community spaces, opportunities for artists, documenting queer performance, and sharing knowledge and methodologies. 

Central to this two-day meeting in London were rich and creatively activating conversations regarding what it means to archive queerness and queer performance. These conversations were rounded off at a dinner hosted by artist Nando Messias at the Garrett Centre, where guests were prompted to reflect on the following questions: What is queer? What is an archive? What does queering the archive look like?

I am a current MA Applied Theatre student at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and am on placement at LADA for the summer term. In my coursework at Central, I have developed a curiosity in archiving queerness through performance and how this can become a community project. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to this dinner, where I was introduced to a room of people who all care deeply about expanding the possibilities of archiving queerness and who are dedicated to the exploration of this work in their artistic practices. 

At the dinner, each guest was seated with a felt-tip marker at their place setting so that they might record their responses to the questions posed by Nando (above) and thoughts throughout the evening on the paper cloth covering the length of the twenty-five seat dinner table. This concept was inspired by Lois Weaver’s Long Table Format, a tool for recording community discussion and cultivating engagement. The implementation of this technique effectively created a live archive of the evening’s thoughtful conversations.

Scattered across the notes on the tablecloth, common themes and questions emerge about what it means to archive queerness. It seems to be a shared sentiment among the guests that to archive queerness is to archive a feeling – something intangible and deeply embodied. Traditional archival practices are in many ways antithetical to queerness for this very reason – queerness is not sterile (a word Nando used to describe traditional archives at this dinner). Queer is ‘tangitive’, ‘fucking with everything we think we know’, ‘changing’, and ‘unfinished’ – all definitions found on the tablecloth notes. In Nando’s words, ‘there might be bugs.’

Frequent questions recorded on the tablecloth notes are some variation of ‘who gets to archive queerness?’, ‘who is the archive for?’, also, ‘what should be included in a queer archive?’ This dinner did not leave us with clear-cut, neat answers to these questions or a pathway of what archiving queerness and performance should look like. If anything, this dinner did the exact opposite by showing us a beautiful variance of thought, experience, and feeling surrounding this topic. This can be seen in the nuanced ruminations written on the tablecloth of the emotion that a queer archive can hold … born out of a ‘fear of losing things’ and at the same time placing value in ‘not capturing.’ This variance is something that is in and of itself quite queer and poses exciting possibilities for the future of this project and the field.