We're talking about Lavender, how do we talk about the rest?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_linguistics

why site based work?

Briefly recapping our last Skype with Liz this morning, she highlighted some main points, namely, the move away from drop in centres to online resources, and the gap and subsequent free space created by the loss of archives. Thinking about the invitation to work site responsively, I was wondering the ways in which site remains important.


ALL YOUR UNICORN FRIENDS ARE THERE

photo via Facebook
Visiting Lille three weeks ago we went to this bar run by Mim, Liqium, where MJS played some music. It's a LGBTI safe space and neighbourhood bar and it feeeeels really good in there amongst the unicorns and the purple walls, it feels like a centre that you want to be at.

Physical centres feel good. We can connect we can share stories in really different ways to online culture. I'd like to recall a lecture by Franco "Bifo" Beradi in relation to global captialism, the populus has lost its body and called the body to get back its language. In an interview afterwards about the talk, John Byrne summarised: 

[...]Berardi posed the reclamation of language as the ‘job of the poet’, the necessity to restore ambiguity, fluidity and metaphor to the languages we use in representing ourselves to ourselves and each other. This poetry, Berardi argued, would return an abstracted and deracinated language to a body which is both physically personal and socially contingent. 

[...] 

FB: Social solidarity is not an ethical or ideological value: it depends on the continuousness of the relation between individuals in time and in space. The material foundation of solidarity is the perception of the continuity of the body in the body, of the consistency of my interest and your interest. Since the ‘80s precarity provoked a process of de-solidarization and a process of disaggregation of the social composition of work. Virtualization has been a complementary cause of de-solidarization: precarization makes the social body frail at the level of work, while virtualization makes the social body frail at the level of affection. Collectivity starts to be fragmented, submitted to the accelerating rhythms of the virtual machine, and this process is parallel and complementary to the fractalization of financial capital. Financial capitalism is deterritorialized and virtual, and acts as a constant recombination of virtual fragments of abstract ownership. 

Franco Berardi and John Byrne, 'Autonomy and Use Value: Connection and Conjunction,' in The Autonomy Project Newspaper 3: At work, Onomatopee 43.3, 2012). http://sites.google.com/site/autonomydocs/file-cabinet/AT%20WORK_PDF_Single%20Pages_web.pdf)

??

So back to street then! Kathleen Hannah speaks about political bodies or how about building the body political??? 

[aside] 

Being there gives us a physical feedback loop, and Marnie's raises an important point during the skype about about visual culture archives as being powerful stake holders. Do they also make up the memory of our political body? I'd say yes, but only if we have seen it or have access to it.

I don't want to drop the idea of electronic forms of communication and community altogether, so I'm wondering about how to work with both and online and physical site simultaneously?

How can this language be reconnected with the body (or site)?

Can our mode of fiction answer the gap between these different temporal spaces?

Do we want to reactivate those drop-in centres?

Do we want to rebuild the archives?

What would that re-building of archives look like?

Would their be [MISSING PART]s thoughout it? 

Could fiction seamlessly understudy the [MISSING PART]?

What kind of new performance could the understudy of he [MISSING PART] have?

Is that [MISSING PART] actually on at a drag workshop?

Morison and Straka / Madame and the Bastard

Madame Morrison, documentary for television profiling New Zealand artist Julia Morison, directed by Sonja de Friez

http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/madame-morison-2005 (cf. 4:45 for Madame & the Bastard)

Madame & the Bastard do black was a series of five 30 second films transmitted 63 times between September 2 – November 30 2000 on TV One (south island), during which was simultaneously shown in the KIOSK (corner High Street and Manchester Street) between 16 - 30 October 2000.

"Advertising for Art & Industry 2000 and short film were combined in ‘do black’ by Madame & the Bastard, orchestrated and conducted by Julia Morison and Heather Straka. ‘do black’ was an intensive, surreal short film screened in five acts on TV One, with different acts programmed into 30 second advertising time slots."

"All People 20+ Years – seen by 93% of the population at least once. (372,000) 74% of population saw them at least four times or more (296,000). 31% saw them at least 10 times or more (124,000)"

http://archived.ccc.govt.nz/council/agendas/2001/June/Environment/Clause11Attachment2.pdf (accessed 28 Dec 2015). 

Testing confessional mode alonside a narrative/spatial twist of pre-flight 'birdshit architecture'

I'll cry at 20,000 feet.

Liar.

I'll cry and my tears will fall and form perfume bottles.

More like ordinary boring stupid containers.

Then, I'll walk and cry but that's different.

Sir, you'll look ugly. 

What a relief?

The hills behind the city are puffy. 

Puffy, puffy, effing puffy. Blah.

When I hear you crying I'll want to cry but I won't feel deep enough, really.

You will never.

No, Sir. I will never. 

I will never, too. I know less about nothing than you about me. 

They're boarding seats 1-10. 

Fark. Don't laugh.

These are sad sounds, Sir.

Whatever. They're my tears?

They're not mine, I can tell you that.


Note: testing confessional mode with a narrative/spatial twist of 'birdshit architecture' . I first heard of this term via my friend Rosie Evans: http://journal.enjoy.org.nz/love-feminisms/urban-form-and-the-gendered-lens

The path between

Modernisms. Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas created lesbian representation at a time where there was none by self consciously taking photographs of each other doing every day things like sitting in chairs looking intellectual, and hanging out with dogs and Picasso. Some people say that, with the community of lesbians that surrounded them, Stein and Toklas created the first lesbian public space (the path between their house and a friend's lilac bookshop). I can't verify that because I saw it on an undocumented internet derive. You'll just have to trust me.

Homophobia free zones: Kiss

Safe zone landing pad for LGBT aliens?

Posters, I'm thinking about posters. That's all.

Safe zone for the LGBT lactose and Fonterra tolerant among us

Queer Space?

Dipping a toe into queer urbanism... 

[Warning: contains high levels of US content!]

What is queer space? Aaron Betsky [author of the seemingly spurious text Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire, 1997] has described queer space as “not built, only implied, and usually invisible,” and as “useless, amoral, and sensual space that lives only in and for experience.” 11 Can we envision a different kind of queer space — space that is more permanent, built and visible, even as we embrace the experiential and sensory?

Excerpted from “Queer Beacon,” an article by by Kian Goh about LBGT resistance to the gentrification of Greenwich Village, New York in Places Journal, June 2011. Accessed 02 Nov 2015. <https://placesjournal.org/article/queer-beacon/>

... and following the debate through to public monuments and the discourse of a gay modernity via abstracts of and excerpts from the chapter 'For Time Immemorial: Marking Time in the Built Environment':

This chapter looks at how Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (places of memory) emphasized the need to revive queer identity, queer cultural collectivity, and marked environments during the post-AIDS onslaught. Queer spaces were initially identified as areas that are not built, only implied, and usually invisible. However, this issue somehow gained attention after the commissioning of two prominent lieux de mémoire: the Gay Liberation monument in New York and the Homomonument in Amsterdam. The chapter also examines Charles Jencks’“Gay Eclectic” style of house architecture, gay neighborhoods, and gay culture iconizing the character of Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz.

Between 1984 and 1992—that is, while fear and grief over AIDS, the previous chapter argued, played out in proscriptions against queer memory—the French historian Pierre Nora was supervising a massive (seven volume) study of what he influentially termed lieux de mémoire, places of memory. These memory sites, which include both physical places and rituals of commemoration, Nora contends, characterize modernity. Places of memory, Nora argued, enact self-conscious efforts “to block the work of forgetting” that is inherent to the “acceleration of history” in “our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change” (“Between Memory and History,” 7, 19, 8). We...

In the book If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Retrieved from University Press Scholarship online available at: http://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=Queer%20Space and somewhere else I can't locate anymore...

And returning to the contemporary context to get a sense of the significance of the field and it's consequence in the rebuilding of Christchurch for its LGBT citizens:

Of potential relevance are the examples of queer urbanism in Goh's 'From and Toward a Queer Urbanism' article in which she concludes:

Each of these [radical queer urbanist] initiatives asserts that the safety and welfare of LGBT people in cities cannot be divorced from the social, economic and spatial conditions of urban environments. From direct acts aimed at changing discriminatory bureaucratic policy to the more consuming work of changing prevailing public opinion, these campaigns literally broaden the possibilities of movement for queers in the city. They map, both literally and otherwise, paths forward for urban social movements that are critically inclusive. 

Progressive Planning Magazine April 14, 2015. Online journal. Accessed 02 November 2015. http://www.plannersnetwork.org/2011/04/from-and-toward-a-queer-urbanism/