Twelve (Queer) Labours: The mundane as catalyst for the archiving of queer transgressive joy

- Parker, Alan

Title
Twelve (Queer) Labours: The mundane as catalyst for the archiving of queer transgressive joy
Creator
Parker, Alan
Subject
To be catalogued
Date
2023
Type
text
Type
article
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469140
Identifier
vital:77213
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2295727
Description
In the first six months of 2022, the small South African town of Makhanda became the location for a series of queer public performance interventions. These interventions were framed as acts of civic labour and involved a diverse group of queer artists, students and allies labouring alongside local artisans and citizens. The project, entitled 12 Labours, was conceived by performance artist Gavin Krastin, and created in collaboration with the collective of labourers, who appeared, guerrilla-style, dressed as garden gnomes in brightly coloured overalls and with pointed hats, in several public places throughout the town. During these once-off interventions, the gnomes would work together, often for several hours, performing a range of mundane tasks for an incidental audience of passers-by. This paper positions the project as a departure point for wider consideration of some of the ways in which mundane acts of public labour, when approached as opportunities for queer performance, can become spaces for the expression of queer transgressive joy. The discussion critically reflects on three of the twelve labours: the communal repainting of a bus stop, the planting of a public garden and the laying of flowers in a derelict cemetery, as a means to consider how the public performance of mundane tasks by queer artists presents an intriguing opportunity for the performance of queer joy, and Black queer joy in particular, in contexts and spaces not typically associated with queerness and with queer bodies. The discussion also considers how the archiving of these labours, as a public exhibition of filmed documentation, constitutes an ‘archive of feelings’ (Cvetkovich 2003) that seeks to document experiences conjured through the performance of mundane labour, rather than merely archiving the act itself.
Format
9 pages, pdf
Language
English
Relation
Performance Research, Parker, A., 2023. Twelve (Queer) Labours: The mundane as catalyst for the archiving of queer transgressive joy. Performance Research, 28(4), pp.42-50, Performance Research volume 28 number 4 42 50 2023 1469-9990
Rights
Publisher
Rights
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Parker, Alan (Mr)
SDG 05. Gender Equality
RU Department of Drama
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