Portals, Ruptures and Hauntings - The Vessels of Queer Memory
Young People’s Programme - Otherness Archive x Queercircle
Portals, Ruptures, and Hauntings - The Vessels of Queer Memory is a relaxed screening exploring selected films from Otherness Archive, followed by a discussion between Kosma (Otherness Archive) and Miggy (QYAC, Museum of Transology, London Trans+ Pride).
As part of Otherness Archive’s residency with Queercircle, they have chosen this set of films to explore the role that memory and imagining plays in queerness and transness, both personally and in our encounters with the world around us.
The screening showcases a collection of animation, collage and experimental short films that carefully examine history, culture and both trans and racialised identities. What effect does experimental filmmaking have on documenting the past? Each film opens a temporal portal into a place where new queer epistemic systems can be made.
Film Access: films are spoken in English
Subtitles: English Captions
Content Notes: trauma, violence, distress, gender dysphoria, transphobia, mentions of the Vietnam War, mentions of racism, gender-based violence.
Film Programme:
Embodiment • Soleil Ren • France • 2022 • 3 min
Hole • G. Goletski • Canada • 2018 • 6 min
Flash Flood • Al MacKay • Canada • 2017 • 6 min
The Boy, The Void and The Storm Cloud • Theo Dunne • United Kingdom • 2021 • 6 min
BLOOM • mirrored fatality • United States • 2020 - 3 min
Compliance • Iona Roisin • United Kingdom, Finland • 2020 - 14 min
Film Synopsis:
Embodiment • Soleil Ren • France • 2022 • 3 min
Embodiment is an experimental film, retracing the authoethnography of a transmasculine member of the Chinese diaspora.
Hole • G. Goletski • Canada • 2018 • 6 min
Mo is an adult with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Mo spends a lot of time in their brain. Today, a hole started following them.
Flash Flood • Al MacKay • Canada • 2017 • 6 min
Deep within a rotoscoped dream, three transgender people confront a cataclysmic flood. Featuring stories from Jessie Anderson, Helen Poon, and Al MacKay.
The Boy, The Void and The Storm Cloud • Theo Dunne • United Kingdom • 2021 • 6 min
Video, sound, painting, costume, tapestry weaving, writing and installation at Chrom Gallery Dalston, London.
BLOOM • mirrored fatality • United States • 2020 - 3 min
The BLOOM music video features soundscapes and footage from immersing ourselves in nature as we ground in our souls as bodies existing outside of isolation, capitalism, gender dysphoria, and the prison state. BLOOM was written together at the top of a mountain in Happy Valley in Tongva Land, so-called East Los Angeles at Sarita Doe and Champoy yurt dwelling ceremony.
BLOOM unearths diasporic queer spirituality and harnesses our ancestral languages - Urdu and Kapampangan. BLOOM is a prayer to honor the bonds of our love that expands and brings regeneration into our multiverse. BLOOM is a spell to inspire deeper connections to our Earth and welcome in freedom and joy for ourselves and kin. Corporations own our water, pushed out BIPOC farmers, and tourism poisoned the salton sea. as water protectors we must bloom new beginnings.
Compliance • Iona Roisin • United Kingdom, Finland • 2020 - 14 min
COMPLIANCE is a poetic examination of how trauma reverberates through the years. A voice speaks, sometimes sings, sometimes fails to say. It is trying to address the points at which various confusions meet and link, in an articulated chain or a ripple. When a discussion of trauma isn’t centred on its origin, the aftermath can play out.
Here, the water facilitates a looking across time, mirrors and windows, as well as gaps and blank spots. A sort of portal, upon which bodily evidence materialises. The voice is sense-making, it maps and unpicks, it looks to teenagers, to suburbia, to middle England, to queer futures, to healing.
COMPLIANCE exists both as a kind of haunting, and as a means of dealing with being haunted.