Resituating Interruptions

Resituating Interruptions is a partnership between the NSCAD Queer Collective and the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive, the first official queer archive east of Montreal. Over the course of the last 14 months, the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive has been working to collect and preserve materials related to queer history in Nova Scotia. These materials include personal papers, photo albums, photographic prints, and other ephemera, but also more unorthodox material that queer archives have become known for such as protest banners, oral histories, graphic art, pins, and mass-produced objects.

In tandem with the collections public launch, the NSCAD Queer Collective will be activating the contents of the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive as a public art project in consultation with the archives team to raise public awareness of and access to the rich queer histories found in this city and province. Materials from the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive will be situated across the city of Halifax, percolating around hot-spots of contemporary and historic queer activity and community. Due to the local nature of the material, “viewers” will be past and current participants of these cultures, responsible for insulating these communities and their stories. Others will necessarily see queer history and its intersections not as sanctioned to specific websites, clubs, cafes, and archive boxes, but as a lived reality that pops up in unexpected places. As an intergenerational project between the NSCAD Queer Collective and the team of the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive, Resituating Interruptions will position material documenting K'jipuktuk/Halifax's queer history in select locations across the city; the installation of material will be responsive to each material’s specific form and location.

Through this disparate installation method, viewers of the project piece together– through hints, affectations, and interruptions– that queer history permeates many of this city’s spaces. This installation approach resembles echolocation itself; there is no substantive core, but rather layers and rings of information that juxtapose the present and imagine possible futures– new forms and relations for intergenerational reciprocity and care. A digitally accessible map, indexing the various installation sites across the city, will be made available.

Resituating Interruptions is a collaboration between artists and community members across several generations, directly manifesting the importance of intergenerational dialogue in sharing queer histories. This project also represents a significant opportunity to speak to the absences and silences contained within the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive. Three Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Colour members of the queer community from different generations will be given an honorarium to create a contribution to the material used in the city-wide installation.