Queer Corners




In Queer Corners is a collaborative video with Dina Georgis. The video examines the ways in which archives harbour stories, those that are spoken, and those left unsaid.

Based on serendipitous encounters, and employing the language of dreams and desire, Georgis and Bamboat narrate each other’s stories and address the complications of queer re-tellings.

In Queer Corners explores the limits and possibilities of the archive through the theme of narration and storytelling. Working with a found object from the dusty and neglected corners of the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archive, this work explores how archival objects can come to life through their encounter with the present, with other desires, and with unexpected responses and meanings.

The archive, if left unexamined, works authoritatively to construct and stabilize knowledge. Though it selects and gathers signs unconsciously, what is held within its walls is neither arbitrary nor innocent. In resistance to interpret archival objects into a synchronized story of the past, In Queer Corners looks to its archival object as an affective placeholder from which new meanings and new stories can be made.

The narratives recorded in this work respond to the found image in narrative accounts where the line between dream and reality is distorted. They speak a non-literal truth about desire, insecurity, despair, sex, race and class, and the difficulty of uttering and representing these very things.

Knowledge itself is vulnerable, made in relation, and articulated in broken stories. Reaching for some thing or some place, the bodies represented tell unfinished narratives. Though the bodies stand alone, the line between self and other is obfuscated and they depend on each other to tell their stories.


COMMISSIONED BY

The Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives

Video, 6 min
Bambitchell, 2012