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  • Performing gestures towards the archive: Queer fragments and other ways of mattering

Cranfield, Ben ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9299-7925, 2023, Book Section, Performing gestures towards the archive: Queer fragments and other ways of mattering In: Breakell, Sue and Russell, Wendy, (eds.) The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context. Routledge, London, pp. 246-258. ISBN 9780429262487

Abstract or Description:

This chapter explores the function of the archival fragment as both evidence of past activity and as persistent materiality in the present. Through a discussion of Trajal Harrell’s Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (2009–ongoing), the chapter argues that the performed gesture is a particular sort of archival fragment that can transcend causal historical narratives and, in so doing, can unfix subjects from their entrapment in purely evidentiary uses of archives. Building on Vilem Flusser and Giorgio Agamben’s theorisations of the gesture and José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of queer futurity through his discussion of the gestures of queer club performer Kevin Aviance, it is suggested that the gesture can be a paradigm for the queer potential of the archival fragment. Understood as gestural, it is argued that the archival fragment can be viewed as a piece of material that, because it belongs to the here and now and the then and there, is always enacting a movement that can allow for the simultaneous rethinking of the past-present-future.

Official URL: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10....
Subjects: Creative Arts and Design > W900 Others in Creative Arts and Design
School or Centre: School of Arts & Humanities
Identification Number or DOI: 10.4324/9780429262487-20
Date Deposited: 22 Jan 2024 13:42
Last Modified: 22 Jan 2024 13:42
URI: https://rca-9.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/5659
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