*BAL (Brussel Almanack Lesbian❤)
*
BAL Brussels Almanack Lesbian
Today represented by: Jessica Gysel, Mia Melvær (but also Loraine Furter + Roxanne Maillet)
Digging up radical spaces from our pasts
through gathering ephemera from lesbian activist spaces in Brussels and beyond
*Thread Catchers - thanks
This week's many conversations has funnily also helped us better understand what we have been doing in the past, and so it will shape what we will do in the future.
We became aware of how much we worked with lists, so we decided to make a list of what has shaped our lists.
This is what we wanted to share with you now.
If you want some unorganised visuals to go with this, we have pasted a pdf to a publication we once made from this collection.
The list shaping list currently looks something like this:
[Defining parameters/elements so far:]
- Gather fragments of histories made by lesbians rather than history that happened to lesbians❤ ( - Not giving visibility to violence but to empowerment.)
- We consciously use the term lesbian to care for its ownership and visibilty
- (❤) Lesbian is in this project is used to embrace and celebrate all possible forms of love and intimacy between people who identify on the female side of the gender spectrum, who have identified as such or have been ascribed a female gender at some point in their lives.
- We are proudly incomplete (non exhaustive)
- Mostly ephemera (flyers, menus, paper programs, member cards, booklets, stapled publications, buttons…)
- Mostly digital pictures / reproductions (not originals) and a latent physicality (facsimilés, fortunes, invitations to photocopy)
- Our work is informed by and echoes the materiality, conditions/means of production of what we encountered (mostly photocopied flyers, booklets, newsletters, mostly flat elements…) — and cherishes its limited means (foldings, colored papers, etc)*
- We are not the original makers or holders (even though we have archives and this becomes a growing thing**) so crediting is very important.
- We work bottom-up, small scale, non institutional, not coming from an archiving background
- We are not sure if we are an archive, but we might look like one (started with a spatial presentation + publication https://www.balbrussels.be/BAL-publication-2018.pdf )
- We work in connection with other groups/projects/organisations.
- We are also not sure if we are a collective but we often work like one
- We love lists as a way to build and organize
- We wish to credit while veil identity — honoring both outness and the closet – and we are always up for playing hide and seek.
- Showcasing collective volume while protecting the individual.
- We work to not creating a too precious archive, humour is essential and purity is not an option
- We use items, fragments and ephemera to guide us towards the right voices and personal stories. The context is as important as the “items”.
* The same way as Mayday Room is an archive of archiving methods, we are archiving reproduction methods and forms
- – How to take on board the heritage of the production as well as content
** relations/relay/movements between public archives and personal ones (donation to an archive, gifts to us, borrowing/thefts from archives…)
Possible questions for the future:
- Physical archive/place in the future?
- Looking up organising by tactics (or similar)
- Addressing blindspots
- Knowledge in objects and how to think of distribution in a way that puts the resources where the labour is made
- Work on our glossary
- Should the word lesbian from now on always be written Lesbian❤ ?
References to think about:
Rosemary / Mayday Rooms
- – bottom up archiving
- – tactics as a category
- – Building an archive that is partisan and political
- – joy / anti-daunting activities as care for caretakers
- — keep internal systems of archiving // boxes that Clara was bringing up (materiality of the archiving system)
Clara
- – Cannonical lists
- – Representation and credits
- – redistribution of volume, credit, capital, access
- – radical administration
- — volumes > taking space, sound-amplification, multiplication
- – structure as an act of kindness
- – transcription as broadcasting
Femke
- – You can't avoid getting your hands dirty in this compost pile
- – (resonating with : Purity is not an option)
Elodie
– Make room for hybridity
…
Unfaithful transcript
(anti-reference to the gross saying "a translation is like a woman, it should be either beautiful or faithful")
To have a library is to have a custodian
The crossover between a family album and a mystery box
X-dexing (jara/iterations)
Glossary
Network of connections to BAL:
Mothers & Daughters – a lesbian and trans bar – https://www.mothersanddaughters.be
Girls Heart Brussels – https://girlsheart.brussels
* discussion with Clara: alternative spaces are often where you can also drink and eat together
BNA-BBOT — sound & audio (radios?) http://www.bna-bbot.be/Public/
Rosa Archive
AVG_Carhif
Fonds Suzan Daniel
Marian Lens
Lieve Snellings
Carine Demeesmaeker
*
Questions, queries and queeries Unbinding the BAL library
- How do we best share, open, and create experiential dimensions to this material while still caring for the people who created it and not putting their lives on display?
- practical case to develop tools/protocols negotiating with visibility/opacity; located/nonlocated
- personal/public: very concrete example of people's addresses on publications (subscriptions) > what to do with such personal info
- access: through which dimensions? (written, images, sounds …)
How do you deal with archiving methods (ex. homosaurus) that are mimicking existing systems?
- For anyone who is considered "other",
- Who is the archive / library for?
- What is then bottom up archiving?
Parameters?
What is a publication? If it's not a book but more like ephemera? In boxes etc.
- Question to IHLIA: what made it into the bigger (OBA) arhcive?
- how to archive unarchivable materials?
- how do you make an archive come alive?
- “activate” archive (find other words than activate?)
- not exposing?
- toxicity: how toxic elements are part of the compost pile
- members card = way in (using toxicity as a way to protect yourself)
- Using toxicity as a way to protect? Like owning bad words / slurs...
- structure as an act of kindness (Clara)
- From discussion this morning - Practicality: its a process, a practice, a trial and error, Library of Inclusions and Omissions limitation is that it is an "art" practice, perhaps remains a symbolic gesture rather than something that can be a new institutional/organization method.
- what's behind art: remains too absract, too much of a projection of something, and not a lived experience, not transferrable into other spheres and experiences, or domains (outside of the arts)
- outside of the arts field
How to make a system? Not by mimicking but finding our own path?
For Bal to bring something that surpasses the realm of art and go into different sferes
FROM ROSEMARY / Mayday rooms
BAL: I loved the description of BAL and the different ways you brought together fragmented historical sources, MayDay Rooms collection is made up of similar types of material and I would be interested in thinking though the nature of political ephemera as something that is a trace, contingent on other strategies other than a catalogue to become understandable.
I really like BAL's use of lists instead of indexes that includes spaces, slang, rumours, parties etc. We have also been thinking about different ways to group material in our digital archive (https://leftove.rs) around things like spaces (squats, infoshops, bars etc), this has been particularly useful with our Underground Techno Archive that looks at resistance to the Public Order Act (1993) in the UK through mapping the sites of protests and raves (https://audio.maydayrooms.org/techno-activate).
Cannonical lists
Representation and credits
redistribution of volume, credit, capital
radical administration
*Notes about the conversation on Wednesday 13 May
https://www.balbrussels.be/animated-image.gif
https://www.balbrussels.be/
Give platform to queer Lesbian women in Brussels, often linked to bars, from 1953 till 2003
Lesbian queer tour with Marianne Lens (first women to have queer feminist bookstore, Artemis, till mid 90s)
Reading room & publication & exhibition in 3 editions of Mothers & Daughters (temporary Lesbian bar in Brussels), bar was live version of what exhibitoin was contextualizing (no normative code of conduct)
compilations of lists: spaces, mouvements, anecdotes, alphabets, manifestos.... as a way to contact people & reactivate materials as fac similes
pitfalls: some of the materials is hidden on purpose, privacy issues
in exhibition they presented 4 lists (protests/social spaces/language/magazine covers), you could never see all the material from 1 point of view, you needed to lean in to look around the corners - showing/not showing
not a complete overview in the materials, they created a chronological order in the materials, so that types of materials mixed
interviews in publication as link to present/past
link to Unbound Libraries:
- we have archive without any conventional structure, wish to give it some form of structure, no ambition for accuracy
visibility as a way to show certain heritage to group of people, non detailed/accurate archive, rather show volume/fragments
-> which tools/systems to use to do this?
- we have system of symbols as a way to look further into the materials: not aim to become other library, rather collection
raise questions with this specific archive
mystery on how queer archives are organized, every library has own tools/keywords...
interest in personal lifes, hard to find in library structures
a lot of archives morphed into large library systems, made it less accessible
still other media: audio, visual
lesbian 'disappears' often in other categories
how to access through other aspects than text - f.ex. visual language/audio/...
-> practical case to develop tools/protocols negotiating with visibility/opacity; located/nonlocated
-> they will share lose fragments & pdf of the publication for now, and will talk about how to best be able to share more with the group.
Examples of libraries/archives/resource centers
Cross-projects / Unbound Libraries
Read-in & Hackers and Designers
http://homosaurus.org/v2
https://www.ihlia.nl