Museum Mismatches and Institutional Dysphoria: Relations Between Museums and Sexual Dissidents Outside the Anglophone World

Abstract

This article will address experiences centred around relationships—which are often conflictive—between sexual dissidents and museums, in particular outside the Anglophone world. In it, I address certain projects that I have worked on personally and collectively as an artist, and offer reflections that are undoubtedly conditioned by my own status as a migrant and sexually dissident person who collaborates with a museum in Barcelona. In this regard, the article is not a theoretical one, but rather a personal reflection intended to analyse my experiences situationally, and to identify ways for museums and dissidents to relate that take on and circumvent power relations, the logic of mere representation, and ‘extractive practices’ that have marked these relationships to date.

Keywords:

• Sexual dissidence
• Queer
• Museums
• Extractivism
• Tensions
• LGBTQI+

Note from author

I prefer to use a referencing system that displays the authors’ first names, and therefore their gender, but had to conform to the journal’s standards, which follows the Harvard referencing system, which does not include the authors’ full names.

Notes

1 The project name is in Catalan because we work with materials from a context in close proximity to Barcelona. By keeping the title in this language, we seek to relocate what is most universally described as queer, interpreting the concept as a series of issues that do not fit (this is one of the meanings of the word desencajado).

2 While it is true that there are a number of ‘other’ ways of labelling archives that do not conform, such as counter-archive (Kashmere 2010) or anarchive (‘Anarchive – Concise Definition’ n.d.), we decided to retain the term ‘archive’ because sexual dissidence may also make use of the term, even if in a way that deviates from concepts that have at times become normative.

3 Julieta Obiols, Vatiu Nicolás Koralsky, benzo, Diego Posada, Javiera Pizarro, Héctor Acuña, Juan David Galindo, Lina Sánchez, Lior Zisman Zalis, Itxaso Corral, Isamit Morales, Alexander Arilla and as external participant to the PEI, Camila González S.

4 The tarot deck can be viewed at MACBA’s archive: https://www.macba.cat/es/a12181

5 The word cuir was not only used in the monograph issue of the magazine Ramona ‘Micropolíticas Cuir: Transmariconizando el Sur (Cuir Micropolices: Transhomosexualising the South)’ (Davis and López 2010), but also by valeria flores (2013) and a series of Southern Cone authors. It was also used in an event at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid between 15 and 19 November 2011, ‘La Internacional Cuir (The International Queer)’. Although a neo-colonial tone emerges from this event, since it represents a moment when the Madrid museum grants visibility and legitimacy to the South (the programme of videos on display is mostly materials from Latin America) it also expresses resistance to colonial epistemology in its presentation text: ‘The queer/cuir variation referred to in the title of the exhibition has two journeys the geopolitical inflection toward the south and from the peripheries (see issue 99 of Argentinian magazine Ramona), which seeks to give visibility and establish alliances between the different micropolitical practices which are a counterpoint to colonial epistemology and Anglo-American historiography that, until now, had dominated visual representations of feminist and gender studies’ (Prospectus The international cuir, November 2011, MNCARS).

6 I use the acronym LGTB, and not the one adopted by the journal (LGBTQI+), because this is the one that was used in debates around civil union in the so-called Chilean territory.

7 It should be mentioned that in the Chilean context and as a result of political pressure from official LGBT groups, samesex civil unions have been allowed since 2015, but at the same time abortion remains illegal under all circumstances. One of the organisations that has most promoted the idea of the homosexual normalisation bears the almost caricatural banner of ‘equals’ (Iguales).

8 flores also proposes a cuir map of the interior of Argentina, designed to address unequal access to distribution to make the material contexts of the subjects themselves visible. This map ‘would have to begin by designing new coordinates that question the capital-interior axis on which the founding of Argentina rests, upon which another series of hierarchical binarisms (civilisation/barbarism, modern/backward, etc.) collapses. This marking and demarking operation involves a dispute against the naturalisation—depoliticisation—of unequal access to a voice in public circulation and the invisibility of individual and group creators. It is a miniscule decolonising practice that moves from the selfinvisibility of the subject of enunciation and makes visible the materiality of the contexts of production.’ (flores et al. 2014, p. 22)

9 Many of the reflections in this section were developed in a previous article which we published in collaboration with certain students who participated in the Arxiu desencaixat project (Egaña et al. 2018).

10 This is the case of Mercé Otero, of Caladona, who stated that in our search she was able to reinterpret certain materials from the archive as ‘queer’ for the first time.

11 The 2019 definition which is still under review can be consulted at https://icom.museum/es/recursos/normasy-directrices/definicion-del-museo/ [Accessed March 2020].

12 One case of a speculative museum is MAMI, an art and archaeology a museum which I have the pleasure of running and which functions as a digital space. See: https://museamami.org/

13 Campuzano (2009) describes the project in these terms: ‘The Transvestite Museum began in 2003 with the purpose of articulating the memory of transvestism amid prejudices and definitions of third parties, as well as the commonalities and differences between the diverse group of people who call themselves transvestites. Its sources are diverse (anthropology, art, history, law, press, testimonies) as are its dissemination strategies […] The Transvestite Museum has been presented as a show, performance, protest, book, or conference. Examination of its sources and formats enables a multifocal approach to transvestism which is also able to reconsider, consistent with its purpose: spanning the intangible transvestite and Peruvian’ (p. 81).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucía Egaña Rojas

Lucía Egaña Rojas is a Chilean artist currently living in Barcelona. In addition to her artistic practice, she is devoted to writing, research, teaching and audiovisual production. Her work questions the concepts of high and low culture, the high-tech and low-fi, public and private spaces, and North-South relations. She studied Visual Arts in Chile, and received a Master's degree in Creative Documentary Making and a PhD in Audio-Visual Communication in Spain. She currently works at the Independent Studies Program of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. In parallel, she is a participant in two research studies and works on embroidery, videos and performances.