Date/Time

Queer history is innately informed by lack, by myriad lacunae. Our collective cultural consciousness is permeated by an intractable trajectory of systemic omissions, missing reels and redacted documents. Our subjective lineages are porous and incomplete, equally marked by loss and by potentiality. How can we explore the negative space within the archive, what film scholar Giuliana Bruno refers to as "streetwalking on a ruined map," as both a generative constraint and as a locus for utopian revisionism?

In this program we will investigate the liminal circumferences and sacred geometries that materialize within the nebulous interstices of data and detritus. Gaps in our quantitative knowledge, holes in both logic and in bodies, celestial and corporeal, correlate directly to Samuel Delany's concept of "the unspeakable"; knowledge that can only be transmitted somatically or by paralinguistic activity, circumnavigating conventional societal boundaries. In this sense, we can utilize the hole as an oblique strategy, to experiment with the limitations of language and the representational power of illegibility.

Through open dialogue, interdisciplinary performance, and immersive engagement with contemporary poetics, we will work through the intrinsic queerness and multifaceted semiotics of the hole:

*as nexus of quantum entanglement 

*as weaponized erasure 

*as topography of contagion 

*as formal construct

*as glitch in the matrix

*as means of divination

*as an erotic commons that catalyzes alternative modes of social reproduction

These interlocking methodologies and spheres of inquiry are simultaneously indebted to Jose Esteban Munoz’ theories of queer temporality, as they are to Sappho's fragments, to cryptolects such as Polari, to trans oral histories, to the innumerable pseudonyms etched into toilet stalls or attributed to pornographic performers. Together we will gaze deep into the collective void and utilize a fully hole-istic approach, allowing ample capacity for play, risk, and indeterminacy along the way.

 

 

https://youtu.be/a82kzIZHzQM

Event Type

Live or Virtual