*written for Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) thesis (Feb, 2021)
This essay will channel trash, and its journey through the world, to propose an alternative approach to the archive within curatorial practice. Using trash as a guide, I will explore how ephemera can be a tool for building archives that are full of feelings. Harnessing the spectral quality of trash, I will consider how ephemera can intimately represent personal and collective memories and how archiving ephemera can counter traditions of the archive. I will also postulate that ephemera, like trash, resists and subverts the concept of object as commodity while also helping us think of time as nonlinear and cyclical.
At points in the journey, we will rummage through containers and carrier bags, skulk past soggy leftovers, and wade through washed-up waste, at last arriving to welcome puddles of insight. As something that feels transitory, trash is actually long-lasting, and ephemera in the archive can also have a lasting resonance. Invoking Donna Haraway, if 'it matters what compostables make composts' and 'what stories tell stories,' then I seek to tell the story of the non-compostable, the trash, the treasure.
But first, another story.
In Wong Kar Wai’s 1995 film Fallen Angels, the central character, nameless and infatuated with the hitman she works for, remarks that 'going through a person's trash can tell you a lot about them.' She routinely goes through his garbage and smokes the last of his cigarettes before curling up on his bed, crying and masturbating. Traumatised and turned on, the trash brings her into contact with the person she loves - although she has never met him. Within the empty packets, old receipts, and leftover matchboxes, the spectre of her lover exists.
Having someone root through your trash is an uncomfortable thought, worse still if they are doing so to find out more about you. Perhaps it conjures images of shadowy stalkers going through large dustbins at night. Or worries of your partner seeing your used cotton buds while bin-fishing for the ready-meal instructions. The things we throw away - to-do lists, bus tickets, cards, flowers, corks, bottle caps - begin to trace the story of our lives: how we live, what we consume, where we have been, and whom we love. Trash is an archive of waste, spectral and encoded with feeling, fantasy, and phantoms.
Ephemera, conversely, is the trash we keep, memorabilia that comes to signify experiences, memories, and feelings. It is inessential but often invaluable. Ephemera has been included in various archives as a repository of memory and marks a vital antidote to larger institutional collections. Archives that include ephemera often break with archival conventions and work to preserve the collective memories of different subcultures, particularly queer and POC communities. Ephemeral archives have lots in common with queer archives, reimagining ways of remembering and complicating notions of history and time.
In Ephemeral Material: Queering The Archive, Alana Kumbier outlines this connection between archiving ephemera and queer archives in expanding remembering practices. Through referencing the archival projects of Jack Halberstaum and Ann Cvelkovich, Kumbier demonstrates how queer records are inclusive:
'These records overlap with some of the records archivists already collect — photographs, letters, diaries, oral histories — but also include records that are less likely to be collected by archivists, including mass-produced recordings, pornography, magazines, and ephemera (like t-shirts, sexual paraphernalia, buttons, fliers, club or venue souvenirs).'
The objects included in these queer collections are unlikely documents for the conventional archive. Queer in both their form and contents, these archives build complex histories through collecting ephemera from a community’s personal, social and sexual lives. Cvelkovich argues for ephemera in archives as 'associated with nostalgia, personal memory, fantasy, and trauma [which] make a document significant.' Kumbier, too, shows how these expansive collections record and affirm the history of queer communities, documenting their cultural production alongside their cultural practices. Archiving ephemera builds collections that unite personal and collective memories as well as feelings.
Further to this, theorists Cvelkovich, Kumbier, and Diana Taylor have expanded archival practices to include 'the ephemeral.' In An Archive of Feelings, Cvelkovich traces various archival projects which seek to include the 'material and immaterial' and 'incorporat[e] objects that might not ordinarily be considered archival' or '[resist] documentation because sex and feelings are too personal or ephemeral to leave records.' Seeking to archive feelings or experiences that resist documentation completely reworks the archive and poses the question, how do we archive the ephemeral? In Taylor's practice, she focuses on remembering the immaterial through what she refers to as 'the repertoire.' The repertoire 'enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing' to record ephemeral acts or non-reproducible knowledge. Concerned with feeling over fact, these expanded archival practices include unconventional documents, performance, and embodied memory working to dematerialise the archival object.
This reinterpretation of the archive takes a detour from Derrida's foundational critique of the archive as an institution that categorizes and orders the point of overwriting memory. In Archive Fever, Derrida states that: ‘the archive [...] will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive [as] internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory.’ However, ephemeral materials avoid these conventions of documentation and consignation. Instead, they root the archive in feeling and present histories that are abundant, messy, and queer. Scouring through the trash pile, we will explore the space of the archive, ephemeral objects, and poor images to discover archival practices that better record histories full of feelings.
‘Hot night, wet night
you’ve seen me before.
When the streets are
drenched and shimmering
with themself, the
mangy souls that wan-
der & fascinate its
puddles, piles of
trash […]’
It's your coffee cup, your greasy pizza box, your toothpaste tube. Biscuit wrappers, bottles, bubble wrap, its job was to carry and protect, and it served well. But now it seems evanescent, as it hits the bottom of the bin, immediately disregarded and forgotten.
Whether full or empty, from the outside containers are haunted by their contents. The envelope that holds the love letter and the sleeve that holds the fries represent a person's experience of the object inside. I will show how containers, which seem transitory, are a helpful model for remembering practices, representing the place of the archive and the communities around them.
Perhaps the most well-known story of trash is the 2008 Disney Pixar film WALL-E. Set in the year 2700, the film follows WALL-E, a lonely robot tasked with cleaning a waste-covered Earth. As WALL-E cleans, he sometimes stops to collect spoons, folks, old films, and other miscellaneous items, bringing them back home and adding them to his collection. In a memorable montage, Wall-E finds a velvet box containing a diamond ring, which he hastily tosses aside, choosing the velvet box for his hoard. As a seemingly absurd action, Wall-E chooses the dusty, dirty container for its functional hinge rather than the precious ring inside. As Halberstaum notes, 'this moment is a fantastic rejection of commodity fetishism,' but in the context of the archive, it can also help us think about the importance of the container as a store for memory, nostalgia, and personal history.
Existing outside of capitalist socialisation, WALL-E is a robot but with undeniably human traits. In the story, his instinct to collect and his desire for love and connection are easily recognisable. One way of thinking about his affinity to this box can be through Ursula Le Guin’s A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Le Guin’s essay sees containers as a metaphor for storytelling. She notes:
‘If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket [...] and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it [...] or put [...] the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again - if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all.'
Le Guin argues that employing the metaphor of the thing that carries allows for the narrative of the whole rather than the narrative of conflict and competition. Not only does she mark this as a sacred act of gathering things and people together, but she also highlights the continual process of this action. WALL-E is drawn to the container, taking the box home and placing it in his own museum or shrine. The container becomes an instrument for holding feelings alongside stories and memories. Le Guin marks the action as cyclical, occurring day after day, avoiding a progressive notion of time. Like the human act of gathering, archives are spaces for collecting, building around, passing on.
Archives are containers. The archive is not just its contents documents but the space, room, or building that contains them. Without a container, the archive does not exist. While the architecture of the archive has been criticised as a signifier of power, it has been a site of potential for artists. Uriel Orlow's nine-hour video Housed Memory (2005) documents, in time and space, the size of the first Holocaust archive in the world. The focus is on the archive's physical space, which represents the incomprehensible nature of the archives' contents, 'captur[ing] the totality of what cannot be accessed.' We see file after file, cabinet after cabinet, and must contemplate the meaning of the archive's existence. The video makes feelings within the archive tangible, that which could only be captured in fleeting moments becomes drawn out, ephemeral to lasting.
'Housing' is a way to contain the transcience of memory, but many queer archives go further to show how the archive can also house communities. The San Francisco's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society of Northern California (GLBTHS) is an archive that holds queer ephemera 'such as matchbook covers, [...] flyers for club events, personal photo albums, condoms packaged for special events, and vibrators' as well as a venue for talks, screenings, quizzes, and parties to celebrate queer histories.
Glasgow Women's Library (GWL) is another example of a community-focused archive. As the 'only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to women's lives, histories, and achievements,' GWL houses formal archival documents alongside zines and other ephemera. They too frequently hold events, reading groups, and artist residencies that focus on supporting their community. Such organisations employ members of their communities to work as archivists or provide artists residencies, continuing to champion members of their community. These archives contain far more than just traditional archival documents.
Fig 2. A selection of zines from GWL archive
Thinking again about 'housing,' several queer archives also choose to keep their collections in sites that 'combine private and domestic spaces with public institutional ones,' moving away from many museum collections' colder layout. Cvetkovich notes that several organisations such as the Lesbian Herstory Archive (LHA) and GLBTHS have adopted a 'semi-public' model. LHA in particular:
‘continues to combine private, domestic spaces with public, institutional ones, particularly because it occupies a building that was once a home: the downstairs living room serves as a comfortable reading room, the copier sits alongside other appliances in the kitchen, the entryway is an exhibit space, and the top floor houses a collective member who lives there on a permanent basis.’
These housed archives are more like homes, cultivating warm spaces and valuing emotional experiences rather than ‘a narrowly intellectual one.’ Contained within these archives is an array of cultural material, including memorabilia, zines, events, performances, and communities, and a feeling of home.
Fig. 3 Inside Lesbian Herstory Archives, New York, USA
The container is essential for holding feelings, histories, and communities, ensuring they do not fade. After all, trash is not transitory, as the rubbish heaps that we collect on this planet will long surpass our lifetimes. However, it is for people (or robots) to find neglected things and make them new.
‘[…] Sunday
I photographed mounds
of trash, finally
turned the focus on
me, a portrait I
could accept. I
feel erotic, oddly
magnetic to the
death of things
emptily attracted to
the available empty space [...]’
Remember, you need to take the bins out. Open the lid and it stares back at you, a soggy mound of lipstick-stained tissues, gum-stuck receipts, ripped off labels, and folded crisp packets. Heave it outside, watch it doesn't drip. Shove it in the dumpster with everyone else's junk.
Leftovers are something in excess; often food left after a meal, some people keep, others throw away. Leftovers can also be the traces we leave on objects, the overabundance of the self. They are traces of our messy consumption, marked with a history and a memory. Leftovers stay with the object after it is thrown away, an ephemeral and bodily residue leaving objects used, stained, and spoiled.
In My Mother, The Other or Some Sort of Influence, Quinn Latimer writes about opening her mother’s books to find traces of her after she had passed away. She writes: ‘I flipped through them finding the pages she had turned down […] breaking its frame roughly, profanely, marking its utility. Some use some ruin.’ The traces left by her mother leave an emotional and bodily imprint on the object. As Latimer tries to imagine why her mother underlined certain lines or turned down specific pages, the marks become profoundly personal and private; they mark a feeling that is unknowable. Residue, like 'tears are traces of memories.' The dirty, sticky, torn things we impress ourselves upon represent a moment of feeling and a bodily production. Leftovers can help us think about ephemeral archival objects as documents of feeling rather than historical fact.
Exploring the notion of residue and what is leftover is the artist Jasleen Kaur, particularly her moving image work Ethnoresidue (2020). The video is a mediation on her family's history, their move from India to Scotland, and her personal archive. She layers images of her family, her home, and footage of her son against drips and splashes of anonymous residues. Writing that her work 'explores the complexities of identity, belonging, reckoning with histories and their entanglement in colonial structures that persist,' the video reflects on parts of culture left behind when emigrating to a new country.
Fig. 5 Jasleen Kaur, Still from Ethnoresidue (2020)
As a method of survival rather than assimilation, Kaur says:
‘[her] maternal uncles in old photographs [...] cut their long heads and faces of hair when they arrived in Scotland, disguising themselves amongst the pale masses. But in 1984, after Indira Gandhi attacked the Harmandir Sahib, anti-Sikh riots ensued, killing 17000 [...] or more. Shockwaves were felt in the diaspora where faith was reclaimed in protest and solidarity six-metre lengths of fabrics were once again folded and tied onto place on their heads.'
In revisiting her family history, Kaur notes how traces of her family's culture were left behind, the hair cut from their heads. However, later these leftovers are reclaimed, showing how identity shifts and recycles over the years. Residues are histories; they run through generations, burrowing down and resurfacing like memories. Ethnoresidue tracks the ebbs and flows of family histories as Kaur ‘track[s] backwards to see forwards’. Leftovers can help us think about the ephemeral nature of memory. It is fleeting but recycles coming and going but always leaving spectral traces.
Initially commissioned for Tramway TV in 2020, the work was recently shown as part of If You Know, You Know film screening curated by Marcus Jack alongside the publication Dowser, notes on artists’ moving image in Scotland: Jugalbandi (meaning duet). This publication compiles two essays from Alia Syed and Kaur, with Syed commenting directly on Kaur's video. As Syed reflects on the broken frame filled with polaroid pictures that Kaur gave her, we are reminded again of the residue left on the object. The film and the publication document the broken, the cut, the traces, the trash that represent feelings and experiences. In form, too, the essays are in conversation (an essential part of Kaur's practice) and build a South Asian Glaswegian community record.
Fig. 6 Alia Syed, from Dowser, 3. Jugalbandi, ed. By Marcus Jack, Transit Arts, Glasgow, 2021.
However, the idea of residue has connotations of evidence, as José Esteban Muñoz suggests in Ephemera As Evidence can be connected to proof of wrongdoing. Muñoz references the work of conceptual artist Tony Just describing Just’s performance and documentation of a visit to:
‘a run-down public men's room, a tea room where public sex flourishes. He scrubbed and sanitized the space, laboring to make it look pristinely, shimmeringly clean. The result is a photograph that indexes not only the haunted space and spectral bodies of those anonymous sex acts, and Just's performance after them, but also his act of documentation.’
Muñoz notes that this work is essentially a queer act as it simultaneously accesses a ‘hidden queer history of public sex outside the dominant public sphere's visible historical narratives’’ and erases it. Muñoz argues that Just's work counters the conventional idea of bodily residue as evidence. The cleaning and negation of such evidence propose a different kind of remembering, one that is based around the spectre of activity. It also challenges accepted ideas of evidence and memory as directly connected to objects.
Despite cleaning the room, there is still something left over. To quote Latimer:
‘Walls would not dry, not room, not mind.
History would not dry.
Wet - what grew in it’.
Just's work highlights the ephemeral act's transitory nature, but in removing and documenting the removal, history remains.
The archive is often likened to 'a sea of documents' with 'unpredictable currents.' Arlette Farge, quoted in Uriel Orlow's essay Latent Archives, Roving Lens, asserts that ‘those who work in the archive often describe their journey in terms of diving, immersion or even drowning’... a rendez-vous with the sea”. Looking at how these artists record histories using the concept of residue helps us consider the emotional and ephemeral quality of memory. Rather than filling archives with historical evidence, documenting leftovers and residues can better represent memories and history's relevance to the present. We remember, revisit and recycle as personal memory becomes collective and feeling transcends time. Residues collect into puddles, sticky but inviting, wet spaces we can plunge into, swallow and submerge.
‘[…] I’m driven
by the rainbows
of trash in
puddles, the
frames, posters,
& windows, the
marked sidewalks,
stray shoes […]’
Hoisted and lifted, it tumbles into the rubbish truck, bottles clinking and clanking. Later, shovelled into heaps, disregarded dregs that collect into islands of rubbish. They will wash up on someone else's shores, in puddles, pavements, and curbs of city streets.
Submerging brings us to long-buried and forgotten things, lying deep in personal collections or in computer trash baskets. They are the abandoned photos, usable footage, images out of focus, low resolution, or underexposed. These are poor ephemeral images that capture feelings and embody memory.
In the e-flux article In Favour of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl writes that 'Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores.' What happens when we recycle these images? Steyerl notes that the poor image can undermine hierarchies of the 'rich image,' and among many other potentials, the poor image presents 'fractured and flexible temporalities. In the context of archives, the poor image captures what has previously been trashed or left out of sight and can record memories long forgotten.
An example of the 'poor' image is Sunil Gupta's 1980s tape-slide project, London Gay Switchboard. Gupta's archived work was brought to the art world's attention in Vivid Projects 2013 exhibition Slide/Tape, which was 'a fresh appraisal of an abandoned medium'. Originally part of a student project, Gupta documented the interworkings of the London Gay Switchboard (GLS) and produced a collection of 35mm slides which he made into a tape-slide video:
'The original piece—an installation consisting of a thirty-nine-minute audio collage and dozens of slide images projected from two carousels— was staged once, in 1980, and has never been shown again.'
The film, which had pictures from GLS and various gay pubs and pubs, including well know disco club, Heaven, saw objections from GLS, and instead of being used by them, lay unused in Gupta's personal files. Digitising the work years later for recent exhibitions, the ephemerality of the material becomes apparent. For the 2013 exhibition, the film's sound recordings were noted as missing and the slide tape fragile. In 2020, Glyn Davis contacted Gupta to see if he could access the work, but it seemed '[o]ver the years, its constituent components became separated, disappearing into the depths of Gupta's archive; as already noted, the audio track was seemingly lost.' Davis notes in his essay The Queer Archive In Fragments: Sunil Gupta’s London Gay Switchboard:
‘The next time he and I met, we set aside two days to work through the tapes. Gupta's two cassette players were rather old; the first tape he attempted to play—the interview with Gus Cairns—snapped immediately in the worn cogs. I think I was more concerned about this than Gupta, the sensitivity of the archival researcher to the fragility of objects of study triggering an overly cautious attitude, whereas the practicing artist approaches the same materials as operational or exploitable malleable components, which, if necessary, can be repaired.'
The fragility and fragmented images show the ephemeral quality of the work. Gupta's attitude to the images as all at once breakable, fixable, and malleable marks them with this reusable and recyclable quality. Again what is handled, torn, or broken seems to hold more feeling.
Fig. 8 Sunil Gupta, Still from a fragment of original tape-slide film London Gay Switchboard (2014-15), INIVA/Tate Liverpool exhibition 'Keywords'
This work documents the 1980's Switchboard activity and the reception it received from GLS, and the move by many artists to abandon tape/slide form. Here, the story of the poor image washed-up represents much more than the original project's intention. The original project was intended as a fragmentary and disconnected work placing people's voices against others' photos, a mixture and overlapping of voices. Upon its recent resurfacing, the work feels doubly displaced. It highlights Maggie Humm's argument that the tape-slide form has 'great flexibility and potential for dislocating existing regimes of political representations and for constructing new multiplicities of knowledges.’ The form makes an imperfect kind of cinema that can be disconnected, changed, and easily rewritten, holding potential for fluidity, especially an archival document.
Revisiting this work is a careful process as the tape snaps and breaks when handled, but at the same time, it seems to reflect the fragility and softness of memory. Taking time and care, tape-slide's ephemeral nature counters the fast-paced consumer culture we live in. However, many archivists and historians have often overlooked this material for its instability and ephemerality. 'Materially delicate,' Davis notes that 'individual images could be scratched or burned, and audiotapes might snap or unspool.' While Gupta's images have suffered in this way, their decaying and damage represent something close to memory, blurry, decaying, and messy. Gupta's GLS project goes against 'seamlessness, homogeneity, tidiness' and instead can queer the archive while better representing memory. In Touching What Does Not Yet Exist: Stuart Marshall and the HIV/AIDS Archive, Aimar Arriola notes that: ‘In contrast to Roland Barthes's claim that in replacing actual memories with visual signs, photography 'blocks the act of memory,' Marks argues that the 'illegibility,' 'blurriness' and 'decaying' quality of photographic images can activate embodied memories.'
Fig. 9 Sunil Gupta, Still from a fragment of original tape-slide film London Gay Switchboard (2014-15), INIVA/Tate Liverpool exhibition 'Keywords'
Gupta's photos, specifically those of Heaven nightclub, share this same quality and embody memory. Blurred, dark figures are captured through long exposures against the bright lights. The photos capture multiple seconds rather than the split second and, in their anonymity, represent a collective memory rather than purely personal. As these images often 'tend towards abstraction: [they are] visual idea[s] in its very becoming,' spectral and ephemeral, they reflect the feeling of the club like a recollection.
Both Stuart Marshall and Sunil Gupta's images are haunted in another way. As images taken before 1981 when HIV was discovered, Gupta's images have 'the ghostly presence/absence of many of the dancers [which] takes on added resonance.' In its essence, the poor image is lacking in quality, and its ghostly blurs. The low resolution, the barely visible, hard to read means that they are not immediately accessible or recognisable. However, it is in this distance and the unknowability where feelings reside.
Poor images, lost photos, burnt, decayed, ripped, scratched hold more feeling and memory in them more than the pristine or perfect photocopy. Overlooked, factored out, overwritten upon rediscovery, they capture the artists' process and the moment. We must root around in the dirty muddy puddles to fish out the treasure.
The journey of trash from the container, to leftovers, to washed-up waste has provided an alternative story for the archive. It focuses on where and how archives are contained, ephemeral material in archives, and how we experience memory. Trash has guided this counter-narrative, helping to navigate the particular challenges of archiving the ephemeral from a curatorial standpoint.
As an essential part of queering the archive and producing counter archives, ephemera focuses on feeling. Ephemeral archives build communities around them, supporting and celebrating subcultural histories. Ephemera in the archive also traces leftovers or residues, the distinctive marks of a person and feeling. Building archives around ephemeral materials helps record memories full of feelings rather than through the pristine or well-kept document. Within poor images and abandoned mediums, too, lies the potential for diverse and complex histories to come forward. Ephemera, like trash, is inherently ghostly. It opens up a rupture in time where the past and present can exist together through an evocation of feeling. In a subversion of commodity culture, ephemeral materials place value on memory, nostalgia, and feeling over the preserved archival object, encouraging a more expansive practice for remembering. Fragile and transient, ephemeral materials often better represent memories. Just like trash, they resurface and return: blurry, messy, and disorganised.
Bibliography
Alchemy Film & Arts. 2021. IF YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW - Alchemy Film & Arts.
Arriola, Aimar. ‘Touching What Does Not Yet Exist: Stuart Marshall and the HIV/AIDS Archive’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Vol. 41, (2016), pp.54-63,
BBC News. (2019) Where does recycling and rubbish from the UK go? [online]
Cvetkovich, Ann. ‘An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures’, (NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Davis, Glyn. ‘The Queer Archive in Fragments: Sunil Gupta's London Gay Switchboard.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 27 No. 1, 2021, p. 121-140.
Derrida, Jacques, and Prenowitz, Eric. 'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.' Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, (JSTOR, 1995), pp. 9–63.
Esteban Muñoz, José. ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 8 no. 2, pp.5-16, (Online: Taylor & Francis, 1996)
Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument, exhibition catalogue, (New York: International Center of Photography, 2008).
‘Fallen Angels’, [film] dir. Wong Kar Wai (Jet Tone Productions, 1995).
Farge, Arlette. Le goût de l’archive, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989).
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Halberstaum, Jack. ‘The Queer Art of Failure’ (NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. (London: Duke University Press, 2016)
Kaur, Jasleen. Ethnoresidue [video] (Glasgow: Tramway, 2020).
Kaur, Jasleen. and Syed, Alia, ‘Jugalbandi’, Dowser, notes on artists’ moving image in Scotland, ed. Marcus Jack, (Glasgow: Transit Arts, 2021).
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Latimer, Quinn. ‘Like a Woman’, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017).
Le Guin, Ursula. ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, (1986)
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Myles, Eileen. ‘Not Me’, (CA: Semiotext(e), 1991).
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Figures
Fig 0. Personal photo
Fig 1. Personal photos
Fig 2. A selection of zines from GWL archive. [Accessed 13 March 2021]
Fig 3. Living Room and Library of the current Lesbian Herstory Archives,, New York, USA [Accessed 13 March 2021]
Fig 4. Personal photos and photos courtesy of Claire Preston
Fig 5. Jasleen Kaur, Still from Ethnoresidue (2020), [Accessed 13 March 2021]
Fig 6. Alia Syed, from Dowser, 3. Jugalbandi, ed. By Marcus Jack, Transit Arts, Glasgow, 2021.
Fig 7. Personal photos and photos courtesy of Claire Preston
Fig 8 & 9. Sunil Gupta, fragment of original tape-slide film London Gay Switchboard (2014-15), INIVA/Tate Liverpool exhibition ‘Keywords’ [Accessed 13 March 2021]