July 16 – 26, 2019: “Queering the Map: ON_SITE”

Queering The Map is a community-generated counter-mapping platform for LGBTQ2I+ moments, memories, and histories in relation to physical space. The project collaboratively archives the cartography of queer memory, from park benches to the middle of the ocean —  in order to preserve our histories and unfolding realities, which continue to be invalidated, contested, and erased. From collective action to coming out stories, encounters with violence to moments of rapturous love, Queering the Map functions as a living archive of queer feeling. By mapping out queer experience in its intersectional permutations, the project works to create affinity across difference and beyond borders. At the time of writing, Queering The Map is home to over 72, 000 stories of queer joy, pain, and resistance, in 23 languages, from across the world.

Queering The Map: ON_SITE is a public program that includes a series of workshops, performances, a publication, and an exhibition that translates the virtual world of Queering The Map into a physical location. In an effort to encourage a collaborative, messy, and contradictory curatorial vision, visitors will be invited to contribute to and alter the exhibition by interacting with stories from the platform that resonate with them. What new relationships are possible within and through the digital archive of Queering The Map, when its contents leap from the screen and can be touched and reconfigured? What might it feel like to move through a world animated by queer pasts and presents and what futurities might emerge from this kind of knowledge? How can the digital community generated by the project be activated in real time?

Queering The Map: ON_SITE will be activated by a series of workshops and an evening of performances that deepen and complicate the format of the digital platform and the themes it explores. The programming topics include; digital self-defense for marginalized communities, counter-cartography through beadwork, mapping desire through movement, exploring love as technology, a drag queen story hour, a latin partner dance class, self-reflection through hip hop, recontextualizing personal histories through affirmative autoethnography, prototyping to materialize possible futurities, and strategies for deepening interspecies kinship.

We acknowledge that to be “on site” requires that we question our relationship to the past, present, and future of the site on which we gather – Tiohtiá:ke on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá: ka Nation. Tiohtiá:ke is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. If this is not your land, how did you get here? How did your ancestors get here? How does race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, ability, and class affect the ways in which we relate to, move through, and create space? While the exhibition and corresponding programming is free of charge, we will be encouraging and collecting donations for The Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal.

Although the act of queering space can point out the limitations of the ways in which the world around us is produced and normalized by and for certain people and not others, it is pertinent that we continuously reflect and act on the ways in which settler LGBTQI+ life is complicit in upholding ongoing colonial structures. As a pin on Queering The Map in Honolulu, Hawaii attests: “queer liberation must mean decolonization, and decolonization must mean queer liberation.”

 

⁓ EVENTS ⁓

Wednesday July 17th, 5 – 7pm:
Queering the Map: On_site, Opening + Meal
Free. No RSVP Required.

Performance:
Thursday July 25th, 5 – 8pm: Spectrum: A performance on queerness and freedom
by Jose Richard Aviles and Figgy Baby. Free. No RSVP Required.

⁓ WORKSHOPS ⁓
(All workshops are free & without RSVP)

Tuesday July 16th, 1 – 4pm:
Encrypt Your Nudes
Hosted by Liane Decary-Chen

Wednesday July 17th, 1 – 4pm:
“Prototyping for Emergent Spaces Part 1: yes, and… also”
( https://www.facebook.com/events/484621382303577/ )
Hosted by nènè myriam konaté and Lucas LaRochelle

Thursday July 18th, 1 – 4pm:
Topographies of a Homeplace: Mnemonic Stitching
Hosted by rudi aker

Friday July 19th, 1 – 4pm:
Radical Love as Technology
Hosted by Neema Githere

Saturday July 20th, 12:30 – 1:30pm (EN) & 2:00 – 3:00pm (FR):
Drag Queen Story Hour with Barbada
For children 2-6 years old.

Monday July 22nd:
10am – 1pm:
Body Cartography: Mapping Desires
Hosted by Jose Richard Aviles

2 – 5pm:
Household, Hometown and Classroom
Hosted by Figgy Baby

Tuesday July 23rd, 1 – 4pm:
Interspecies Meditations for Hybrid Futures
Hosted by Jacqueline Beaumont

Wednesday July 24th, 1 – 4pm:
“Prototyping for Emergent Spaces Part 2: materializing futurities”
( https://www.facebook.com/events/484621382303577/ )
Hosted by nènè myriam konaté and Lucas LaRochelle

Thursday July 25th, 12 – 3pm:
Reventon Latin Queer Partner Dance Class
Hosted by Jose Richard Aviles and Figgy Baby

⁓ TEXTS BY ⁓
Ali Adenwala
Jacob Carter

⁓ CURATED BY ⁓
Lucas LaRochelle

⁓ ACCESSIBILITY ⁓
4TH SPACE, at Concordia University is located on the ground floor level and is wheelchair accessible. There is one wheelchair accessible, gender-neutral bathroom on the third floor. To raise other accessibility requests or questions please contact 4TH SPACE by email at info.4@concordia.ca.

“Queering The Map: ON_SITE” has emerged in collaboration with the Beyond Museum Walls (http://capsl.cerev.ca/beyond-museum-walls/) Curatorial Residency program, hosted at the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab.

This project is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s (SSHRC) Connection Grant, the Sustainability Action Fund and the External and Mobilization Fund at Concordia University, as well as the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture.

QUEERING THE MAP: ON_SITE