The research group Beyond Museum Walls has just received a SSHRC Connection grant to support a curatorial residency program at CaPSL in 2019
The Beyond Museum Walls research group will be working with two curatorial fellows, Lucas LaRochelle and Abood Hamad, to develop their research topics, media, and artworks into full exhibitions that seed critical dialogues around pressing social and political issues.
To introduce the first of two curatorial residents who will be working with the Beyond Museum Walls research team at CaPSL:
Lucas LaRochelle is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher examining queerness, technology, and architecture. Their practice spans graphic design, digital media, costume design and wearable technology – employing these mediums as a means of exploring the interactions between the queer body, technology and cyber/physical space. They are invested in using their work as a tool to both critique contemporary culture and explore tangible alternatives.
Their upcoming residency exhibition will be aimed at translating the content of the community generated counter-mapping project, Queering The Map, into a temporary LGBTQ2+ community space through the exhibition of stories from the website. The exhibition will be activated by walking tours and workshops aimed at developing a series of queer spatial interventions.
Jose Esteban Muñoz locates queerness as an affect that is “always on the horizon.” We can never ‘be’ queer in any fixed sense, but rather are always in the process of ‘becoming’ queer. Such a formulation positions queerness in a temporal future, but one that through the existence and resilience of queer people striving towards it, allows it to permeate (and sometimes fleetingly become) the present. Queerness, like utopia, never arrives, Munoz argues, but rather is “a rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” The Queering The Map x CaPSL curatorial residency will aim to create the space to harness the potentiality held within the stories of our queer past and present, to collectively chart the pathways towards a queerer, more radically open, future.