Queering the Archive: A Critical Response to Julian Konuk’s Homme-Sick
Julian Konuk’s Homme-Sick dismantles linear time through the fragmentation of memory across archival and commercial film. Drawing on material from his own familial archive, Konuk explores shared and inherited images as unstable sites of memory, identity and longing. Through a queer reworking of childhood, nostalgia and advertising, the film overlays toxic masculinity and patriarchal structures with pornographic and domestic imagery. Resulting in a disorienting yet strangely nostalgic dreamlike meditation on trans temporality, where recollection loosens, identity remains unresolved and time resists coherence.
We enter Homme-Sick through the fragile intimacy of footage never meant to be recorded: a trembling landscape, errant swipes across the ground upon sandal-clad feet, accompanied by a frustrated voice behind the camera insisting they only want to take a ‘regular picture.’ This is followed by what appears to be a screen recording from a silent film: “You mean that you actually saw living descendants of these monsters that are supposed to have been dead for millions of years?” Taken from the 1925 film adaptation of The Lost World, the line emerges during a speculative exchange about encountering prehistoric life on a remote plateau.
The crackle of home-movie footage returns, briefly, before lifting like a curtain to reveal the artist kneeling in frame. Wearing only a latex and a skin-toned strap-on, he exposes his body, his trans body, marked by both prosthesis and visible breast-reduction scars. He looks directly at the viewer, pushes up his glasses, then deliberately looks away, before returning his gaze once more. This moment reads as a decisive self-portrait, a clear assertion of the artist’s presence in body and gaze. It is this unique oscillation between exposure and withdrawal that establishes the tone of Homme-Sick: a layered assemblage of familial lore, historical and archival film fragments and the presence of the artist himself.
Konuk describes his practice as a “queering of the archive—not necessarily creating queer archives, but queering the archive in and of itself,” while also positioning the trans body as a site of record: marked, revised and continually re-authored. This understanding of the body and memory as systems of documentation has become a significant strategy within contemporary practice, particularly among artists working through personal history and identity. From ORLAN’s surgical performances that render the body a site of inscription, to Puppies Puppies’ sculptural and readymade interventions into the erasure of trans and non-binary histories, and Amalia Ulman’s social media performances that expose identity as constructed and surveilled under societal stereotypes. Across these practices, memory is no longer fixed or authoritative, but shaped by fractures, projections and acts of personal intervention within a wider economy of cultural amnesia.
While Homme-Sick queers genre through a rough assemblage of commercial clips layered and partially erased by the simplified gestures of digital paint tools, its register is far more intimate than this surface might suggest. The nostalgic imagery functions less as sentiment than as a mask, one that obscures, and in turn reveals, a complex personal narrative beneath. From the artist’s sustained confrontation with the viewer’s gaze, to footage of himself as a child with his birth name redacted, to the concluding sequence of hormonal treatment dosages spoken directly to camera, the film stages memory as unstable yet insistently present. Through the abstraction of archival footage and the messiness of a lived queer experience, Homme-Sick articulates how queer and trans identities are shaped through a continual negotiation between personal reckoning and inherited cultural imagery.
Homme-Sick, alongside this text, is generously hosted on Otherness Archive, a visual archive dedicated to documenting queer films and their pioneers while creating space for contemporary filmmakers. In foregrounding trans masculine experiences and resisting institutional erasure, Otherness Archive provides a vital platform for works like Homme-Sick to be encountered, contextualised and preserved on their own terms.
Film Synopsis:
“Homme-Sick” is a short, experimental film in which time itself becomes unhinged and deconstructed; the past and present merge together to create a new kind of temporality that is not predicated upon rigid, linear, and formalistic impulses within narrative filmmaking. Made up almost entirely of archival footage - both found and from the artist’s own family archive - this film questions the relationships between toxic white masculinity, family, the home, and transness, thus creating precarious spaces in which the voyeuristic impulses of the viewer are toyed with. The utilisation of the artist’s own memories and experiences of girlhood and boyhood, as seen through a queer lens, becomes a tool to expand the possibilities of archiving trans bodies. Ultimately, the film meditates on what it means to exist in a state of perpetual transition, where home is neither a fixed place nor a stable identity, but rather an ongoing act of becoming. With no regard to chronology and completely lacking in any form or resolution, “Homme-Sick,” then, attempts to queer the entire notion of the archive, and ultimately of genre itself.