Queerness within/without the Archive

What makes an archive queer? How do queer people use archives, and how do archives use us? Can any archive be queered, and, if so, can its queerness be defined? These questions and more are taken up in a panel discussion.

Renaud Chantraine studied art history and museology at the École du Louvre, and recently completed a doctoral thesis in anthropology at EHESS. Drawing on forms of activist (Collectif Archives LGBTQI in Paris, Mémoire des sexualités in Marseille) and institutional engagements (Mucem), Renaud’s research has focused on the transmission of LGBTQI memory and the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Katja Koblitz is a historian and director of the Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv und Bibliothek Berlin, where she cares for the largest collection of material on lesbian existence in Europe. The Spinnboden is an 'archive from below', born in and out of the lesbian movement of the 1970s to preserve its otherwise marginalized history.

E-J Scott is a curator specialising in inclusive co-curatorial practices that seek to engage communities historically marginalised or misrepresented in museum and heritage spaces. His wider queer heritage curatorial projects include curating the Museum of Transology, DUCKIE’s Vintage Clubbing Series, West Yorkshire Queer Stories and the annual Queer and Now festival at Tate.

Jonelle Twum is the founder and artistic director of Black Archives Sweden, a contemporary archive centered around the experiences and narratives of Afro-Swedes and Black people in Sweden. Informed by a queerfeminist and diasporic perspective, the Black Archives Sweden is a project that approaches the archive as a space of invisibility and erasure, but also a place that holds room for other imaginations, realities, histories and conditions for the future.

Part of the Utopia/Dystopia event series curated by Todd & Zoya. for C/O Berlin as part of the exhibition Queerness in Photography.