An archive of beloved things. archiving as a creative practice of re_membering and un_covering embodied knowledges

Abstract

«An archive of beloved things» is an attempt at finding answers. Not definite ones, more like vast, subjective stories that are informed by the environments they exist within. The silences and blank spots in my history have facilitated my getting to this point. As well as having conversations with other people in the communities I consider myself belonging to, about how we’re going to deal with "not-knowing". The fact that there are parallels in our histories in terms of silences, is of course not a coincidence.

Especially in Switzerland, there seems to be barely any documentation of the presence of Black queer and trans bodies, in the cultural sector and beyond. I understand this as one of the legacies of colonialism, through which knowledges, that are kept alive by queer and trans Black bodies, have historically been hidden and erased.