In this talk and conversation we will speak about layered echo chambers, places of shared desires, languages and artistic practice itself. Places that address intersectional politics of listening, of shifting canons. As places of remembrance and transgression, of confrontation as much as dialogue, of mutual unlearning and undoing. Future readers and performers involved. As experiences of staging, towards new constellations and structures of being together, of thinking together, of creating space and time together.
A play with languages and aesthetics, to be played inside or out. Mediocre design and the Laugh of the Medusa in a world of good designers, of taste and the institutionalization of everything.

The talk will meander along scripts, texts, performances and publications that I wrote, edited or staged in the past years. And the different long term, as well as punctual or situative collaborations and collaborative structures in which they emerged.

In this talk, Terry Holiday will speak about the designs she made for transvestite shows during the eighties in Mexico. She will tell us about her relationship with art deco, her favorite magazines and her aesthetic link with the hippie movement.

Emma would give a visual tour of the night scene of the eighties, through billboards and advertisements from the revue and cabaret shows of the time. She will address the graphic imaginary of that era, present in publications and photographs.

This talk seeks to recognize imaginaries present in trans communities that share a social and cultural context in Mexico.

Participants:
Terry Holliday, Emma Yesica Duvali and César González-Aguirre.

Through the culmination of a series of conversations with women of the African diaspora and those on the continent, in our project And she was wearing trousers: a call to our heroines we examined how female figures in Southern African histories served as entry points into reimagining a Bla(c)k female experience in the past and future. The presentation of installations, film, performance and conversations unearthed often-forgotten feminists, exploring ideas of identity, connection, distance and self. We will share as part of our curatorial and practice methodology, our process of forming cyclic connections through modes of "Call and Response". We invited African women across continents and through this process, the power of interpretation and nuance created a space for tension, discovery and continuity, allowing us to creatively explore our relationships with these women, and the proximity we share with them.

MayDay Rooms safeguards histories and documents of radicalism and resistance by connecting them with contemporary struggle and protest, and by developing new forms of dissemination and collective self-education. Our building contains an archive of historical material linked to radical history. Alongside our material archives, we create and maintain digital archives and databases of radical history, with the hope that these traces of the past might freely be taken up and put to use in present struggles.

Our holdings are focused on social movements, resistance campaigns, experimental culture, and the liberation of marginalised and oppressed groups from the 1960s to the present: they contain everything from recent feminist poetry to techno paraphernalia, from situationist magazines to histories of industrial transformation, from educational experiments to anti-racist struggles.

As way to confront the erosion of public space in London, our building also functions as a free organising and educational space for activists, social movements, troublemakers, and radicals. Our aim is not merely to gather together traces of past radicalism, but to make these sources widely available, and to ‘activate’ them in new and challenging ways so that they may inform and invigorate present struggles.

How to stop and/or face the lying, plundering, destructive and murderous impetus of the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? What are the paths and paths fully capable of dissolving the dissimulated necropolitical plane-time of dominion and sovereignty intended and crossed by the Roman Catholic apostolic order. How can we remember when, from birth, we are held captive in the cathedrals of oblivion? How to establish unfathomable alliances between us, tracing paths that confuse the enemy's wisdom, and allow us to enjoy our own abundances and genuine infinity?

PfffffffffffT! This is what I say when I don’t know what (else) to say. As in "PfffffffffffT!, obviously” but also as in "PfffffffffffT!, I am not concerned”. I am not so much beholden to themes, rather I try to hold myself accountable to guiding principles. I also try to speak more about what I’m doing than what ‘I am’. My answer for ‘why’ is most often ‘because it’s what I enjoy’. Let’s talk about it. Let’s certainly talk about what I mean when I say I’m aiming to become a total system. If I forget, please someone remind me that I want to talk about T-shirts.

From the mid-1980s to the end of the century, the practice of graphic design underwent a series of technological, economic, and institutional transformations. Particularly among U.S. designers, the period is most vividly remembered for its formal experiments and theoretical debates. Postmodernists performed elaborate demolitions of established modernist conventions; in explaining the meaning of these departures, they frequently envisaged a new world of decentralized, non-hierarchical, non-linear communication.

Three decades later, what should we make of all of this? Do we inhabit the sort of future glimpsed by the postmodernists? Are we, after all, still modern? Or, instead, does our century represent something fundamentally different from both — perhaps even fundamentally worse? This talk will argue that, for all its exaggerations and missteps, the debates of the '90s still have something to teach us about the nature of our own work.

Mindy Seu has long been a gatherer. In its material and social forms, as a collection and event, gatherings serve as the intentional aggregation of resources for a specific community. In this lecture, Seu will discuss tools, indexes, and learning trails through five chapters: 1) Cyberfeminism Index, 2) ellipses and citations, 3) asterisks and collective publishing, 4) web-to-print tools, and 5) the Carrier Bag Theory.

In her own words, the American photographer Tee Corinne spent the 1970s ‘exploring ways to make images that read as lesbian’. Making images—as opposed to the more conventional phrasing of taking them— implied that there was both practical and creative work to be done. With her long-term friend and collaborator, and some-time lover, Honey Lee Cottrell, Corinne critically examined the troubled history of photographic representation and experimented with photographic techniques to confront an absence of lesbian representation. A burgeoning feminist press was integral to the work of Corinne and her contemporaries. In this talk, based on a book I am currently writing, I will examine the intertwined ideas of making and reading lesbian images made in the 1970s and '80s in order to think about how histories of queer photography are entangled with histories of queer design.

In post-communist states, where a number of historical threads were broken or, in fact, never emerged, there has been an attempt to construct national identities anew and to create fresh narratives. Today, recent history, including art history, is being largely (re)constructed, as well as often tampered with. In my artistic practice I am particularly interested in such procedures, namely appendicising, rewriting and revising art history from the queer perspective. In my presentation I will take special interest in the ways in which archive-based art can have a political impact on our present and future, including its numerous aspects (i.e. cultural, social and sexual). My long term project titled Queer Archives Institute (QAI) will be offered as an example of this methodology.

Founded in 2015 the Queer Archives Institute is a non-profit informal artist-run organisation dedicated to research, collection, digitalisation, presentation, exhibition, analysis and artistic interpretation of queer archives, with special focus on Central and Eastern Europe. In my presentation I will present the different forms the QAI takes - from an exhibition to a temporary office, a publication, a performance, a lecture. I will reflect also on queer self-publishing practice taking as an example Polish Filo zine from the 1980s and my own DIK Fagazine mag.

“FAGGOTS GALORE. WHIRLING LESBIAN DERVISHES. OUT COME THE FREAKS.”

So begins Fuzz Box Vol. 2 No. 5, a zine edited by Nicolas Jenkins in Montreal at the height of the queer anarcho-punk scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s. In an era shaped by the AIDS epidemic and its ensuing culture wars, violences, and oppressions, zinesters waged queerness as a weapon against bigotry and boredom. Join Nat Pyper for an erotic close reading and page-turning performance of Fuzz Box, the At War issue: an intimate encounter between publishing and desire.

In sixteenth-century Europe, interest in so-called ‘monstrous births’ was rife. Infants with congenital abnormalities were displayed at fairs, outside churches and in their homes. The causes of their physical deviance were considered in medical and ethnographical works, as well as sermons, autobiographies, and a host of other texts. The tradition of interpreting infants in this way was, of course, not new. But in the early modern period, the discourse entered print for the first time. In this lecture I will reflect upon the consequences of this material fact, focussing my discussion on a small group of ‘broadsides’: cheap, mass-produced, single-sheet texts which were intended for a general readership. How did these texts articulate and transmit ideologies of bodily difference? What was the relationship between their form and content? How did they shape public notions of normalcy and deviance?

Walking along a the uneven accountabilities of trans feminist technoscience and critical pedagogy: Feeling out TFTS (TransFeministTechnoScience) will be a lecture based in a not emerged (non-linear and between) timeline. Based in queer theory, trans studies, feminist technoscience and disability justice the lecture will be a remixing of different theoretical texts and artistic and design projects that have impacted me as an artist and researcher. Feelings will be prioritised and omissions are promised.

Taking the lead from Fred Moten and Harney’s criticism of academia and call for dissident forms of knowledge production, this presentation will explore the lives and the work of a group of 20th century figures that enacted forms of fugitivity avant-la-lettre. We will adopt a notion of fugitivity intended both as a breaching of the institutional frame, as well as a desire to trespass the boundaries between theory and practice, different media, literary genres and ultimately art and politics. We will first examine how critic Carla Lonzi’s decision to leave the artworld and embrace separatist feminism, was paralleled by a transfiguration of her mode of writing, aimed at challenging the artifice of language. We will then move to the erratic literary production of 70s gay activist Mario Mieli, which we will examine in light of his political attempt to replace identity with a world of erotic abundance.

Dr. Bess Williamson will share some key moments in historical and current practices of design that addresses disability. From origins in the post-World War II decades, to recent creative efforts, disabled people and their allies have identified the potential for design to align with ideas of social change and justice—but that this means confronting biases and resistance on local and global levels.

Museums are places that are set up to out-survive us. They serve the public and are seen as important places in which a society can define itself and present itself. Museums solidify and legitimate culture…. this is why they have been such important stages of activism! The battle against the supposed neutrality of the Museum has been an ongoing artistic and political investigation. This talk will explore questions that art activism in New York City has raised about identity and the social politics of representation and appropriation in the museum. We’ll consider artistic practices of solidarity though a Black feminist lens, listening to images of protest in order to think through what a radical practice of coalition building might look like in art spaces.

Through listening moments, readings and sharing stories from projects developed over the last decade, we will think about how histories of radical pedagogy and practices of listening play a role in community practice and collective imagining. What are the ways that collective imagining can create alternative spaces for contesting power and advocating for new forms of relation? As an artist, organiser or designer how do you ground your practice in supporting collective desire? The challenge of including the arts and pedagogical practices meaningfully in research, organising and community initiatives is not new, but has grown more important in these crisis-ridden times. There is a need for more collaborative work embracing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and action.

Shapeshifters and tricksters are folkloric figures living at the intersection of different realities and universes — human and non-human animals, the living and the dead. They incarnate multiple ways of being and acting in the world, challenging hegemonic, colonial narratives of universality, scientific neutrality, and homogeneity, and compelling us to think instead in terms of metaphors, contradictions, and borderlessness. Feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa wrote extensively about the necessity for the non-conforming subject to acquire abilities akin to those of the shapeshifter as a form of survival. The colonized subject, she contends, is a shapeshifter in nature, living and speaking from the borders of different languages, identities, and knowledges.

Starting from an engagement with feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist theories, in this lecture we will critically examine questions of positionality, objectivity, and universality design research, and how they relate to the cohesion of Western-centric systems of knowledge. Building upon these reflections, we will then speculate on the anti-colonial and counter-hegemonic possibilities offered by approaching the role of the design researcher as akin to that of the shapeshifter, and by understanding knowledge as composed by a multitude of lived experiences, ontologies and epistemologies between systems.

In 1925, Alain LeRoy Locke was asked to be guest editor of an issue of Survey Graphic, the richly designed periodical covering sociological and political issues of the day. The issue, titled Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, was Locke’s first publication wherein he connected an emerging generation of young black writers, poets, and artists, to what would be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The infamous issue became the basis for the seminal 1925 anthology The New Negro, which marked a shift from a focus on Black bodies to Black consciousness and Black thought.

The following year, a collective of young, black, and some queer artists would write, design, and self-publish FIRE!!, a publication devoted to younger Negro artists. FIRE!! was conceived by Langston Hughes and Bruce Nugent, both of who had work featured in The New Negro. They enlisted Wallace Thurman to edit the publication, and commissioned other black artists to contribute to its pages. The magazine’s varied content contained diverse genres, including essay, design, illustration, plays, and poetry. Tragically, the headquarters of FIRE!! burned down after the completion of the first issue, but not before its content made equally fiery controversy.

In this book talk drawn form Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke, 2020), I outline how lesbian feminists in the U.S. and Canada approached publishing as an information practice key to establishing a foundation for their movements, and building more livable lives for lesbians. Focusing on newsletters, bibliographies and indexes, I show how activists created and circulating information as a world-making process when access to information was otherwise precarious.