Documentation Bank: George Chakravarthi

Research Highlights: Documenting and understanding experiences of backlash currently being received against LGBTQIA+ cultural programming and/or creatives in the UK’s cultural sector from 2020-2025.

Sabrina Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals–where fat bodies were once praised–showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.
Fearing the Black Body argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. An important and original work, it reveals that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Por que falamos em arte nordestina ou arte nortista, mas raramente ouvimos a expressão arte sudestina para nos referirmos às produções do Rio de Janeiro ou de São Paulo, por exemplo? Essa pergunta, aparentemente simples, revela muito sobre o modo como o Sudeste foi historicamente alçado, e se impôs à condição de centro normativo da cultura brasileira. A produção artística dessa região costuma ser tomada como “a arte brasileira”, dispensando adjetivos regionais, enquanto as produções do Norte e do Nordeste foram historicamente enquadradas nas margens, exceções ou exotismos dentro desse panorama…

I Love You Too is a project from a visual artist focused on the writing of letters, shifting the focus from how a community uses a library to how it creates one – a library, in this case, of love. The stories in this book were told during the COVID-19 pandemic by more than 100 people from across Manchester. Through in-person and online interviews with 11 writers, their testimonies were transformed into this collection of love letters. To ensure all those involved felt safe and supported while sharing their deeply personal stories, well-being managers were on hand at every stage of the process. By way of thanks, each participant was gifted a portrait created at the time of their interview. Thank you to the people of Manchester for sharing these beautiful and personal stories with us.

South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere spent MIF19 in residence in Manchester’s network of libraries – and two years on, published I Love You Too, a beautiful book inspired by the time he spent in the city.

At the start of 2021, Wa Lehulere invited more than 100 people from across Manchester to share with us their love stories: to people, to places, even to possessions. Through a series of online and in-person meetings, a group of 11 Manchester writers put their words on to the page. The result is I Love You Too, a personal, powerful and inspiring 232-page hardback book of love letters rooted in our city – and the first in an international series.

This guide celebrates the diversity and innovation of queer individuals in London, both historically and today. Delving into the cultural history of queerness in the capital, this book guides the reader through a welcoming spectrum of bars, clubs, shops, Pride events, charities, saunas and sex shops that cater to the LGBTQ+ community.

Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative and complex personalities of the 1970s’ art world. In Where is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.

Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemerality of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

Fungi Media positions performance art of bodily mutations as a form of corporeal philosophy. Examining ecologies of rot and fungal decomposition, it outlines a theory of fungosexuality beyond sexual reproduction and binary gender roles. This theoretical perspective repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’ – and which stands for a fungi-induced process of decomposition. With this, Fungi Media explores the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such.
The project was developed in a squatted sewage space in London, adopted by the author as a laboratory for mutant performance. The space hosts Chronic Illness events, where Internet-inspired body artists enter an environment populated with fungi. The interventions of human performers are incorporated into the rotten physiology of the space, which itself becomes a live entity. This book involves those events in the analysis of connections between media technologies and primal life processes. It also offers strategies for urban dwelling which transcend normative family life.

Read more at Open Humanities Press– Fungi Media

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of The Cholmondeleys dance company, founded in 1984 by Lea Anderson, Teresa Montano, and Gaynor Coward. Inspired by the DIY culture of post-punk UK, they wanted to create something that resonated with their friends, blending dance with the energy of fashion, music, and club culture of the 1980s.

They named themselves The Cholmondeleys, like a band. Emerging from this vibrant time, their performances featured collaborations with British artists, including choreographer Lea Anderson, costume designers Sandy Powell, Emma Fryer, Simon Vincenzi, composers Drostan Madden & Steve Blake, and lighting designer Simon Corder. Together with their sister company, The Featherstonehaughs (founded in 1988), they produced over 87 works, both live and on film, performing in the UK and internationally. This rich creative legacy is captured in an archive of images by photographers such as Chris Nash, Pau Ros, and Matilda Temperley, now presented together for the first time in this celebration of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs.

This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the normative imagination defined as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of affective capitalism. Porta analyzes gender, fashion, artistic creation, and surveillance from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that now comes not from the state or mass media, but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones, and driven by a juridical compulsion, become the axes of societies of control. In this way, the distinctive pathology of our times gives rise to a globalized game: normopathy for all.

A critical exploration of the creative practice, socio-historical context and cultural impact of multifaceted artist Leigh Bowery. Engaging with Bowery’s key looks and live art through a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou navigates costuming as a performative strategy that blurs the boundaries between art and life.

Thought-provoking and enlightening, the study investigates his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire as well as his fascination with extremity, hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language, establishing Bowery as a radical figure in contemporary perfromance and queer visual culture.

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies “worthy of defending” and those who who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. That those subject to the most violence-the enslaved, the colonized, the oppressed-have been forcibly made defenseless raises, for any movement of liberation, a question: Can violence be used in the interests of self-defense?

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self-defense. With a historical gaze that captures slave revolts, British suffragists’ training in jujitsu, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, queer neighborhood patrols, and Black Lives Matter, Dorlin discovers a “martial ethics of the self”: a practice in which violent self-defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a livable future.

Translated from the French by Kieran Aarons.

Video documentation of an online book launch of  A Good Love Story by Sibylle Peters on 14th February 2021. This conversation spanned  love, intimacy and isolation, the state of Pleasure Activism today,  heterasexuality and the question of what constitutes a good love story.

Sibylle Peters was joined by artist, activist and editor of German pop feminist Missy Magazine Margarita Tsomou; writer and sexual health activist Almaz Ohene; artist and activist Brian Lobel; artist and Heteraclub collaborator Ansuman Biswas; Canadian based artist and activist Cassie Thornton; and artist and A Good Love Story editor Hester Chillingworth.