Aïda Escarré Borràs

OBITUARIS QUEER

Obituaris queer is a research project that arises from the desire to think of the archive as a funerary ritual device. Keeping, conserving, and archiving denied existences can function as a specific ritual to take care of our dead and our deaths.

The lives which are forgotten in the narrative of the “official” history have been forced to create their own spaces of memory. We need to preserve our lives in order to prevent them from being erased by our death. The awareness of death, therefore, enters our doing through the exercise of saving, preserving, and recording who we are. The collective vocation of the archive means that, even after death, as an act of future generosity, we exist and interfere with each other; contacting the archive is always a joint task, never an individual one.

The act of saving, of leaving a trace in sexual and/or gender dissidents, is configured as an act of resistance against the denial of one’s own history and one’s own life. The fear of erasing the traces of existence is activated in the archive and proclaims it as a tool of vindication and as a mechanism for collecting memory for the future, for those to come. This gesture generates a concrete movement that breaks with neoliberal linear temporality and challenges the blunt division between living and dying (Guerrero, 2022).

Beyond this division and using the obituaris queer project as an excuse, I intend to talk about death in the space of the archive. To talk about the dead and the living, about how they affect each other, about how they exist together, about joint desires, about dialogues, about post-mortem militancy, about last and first political or affective wills, and about the possibilities of weaving resistance against the cisheterosexual violence of oblivion.

The project is accompanied by Renata Gelosi.

LINK:
instagram

Aïda Escarré Borràs

OBITUARIS QUEER

Obituaris queer is a research project that arises from the desire to think of the archive as a funerary ritual device. Keeping, conserving, and archiving denied existences can function as a specific ritual to take care of our dead and our deaths.

The lives which are forgotten in the narrative of the “official” history have been forced to create their own spaces of memory. We need to preserve our lives in order to prevent them from being erased by our death. The awareness of death, therefore, enters our doing through the exercise of saving, preserving, and recording who we are. The collective vocation of the archive means that, even after death, as an act of future generosity, we exist and interfere with each other; contacting the archive is always a joint task, never an individual one.

The act of saving, of leaving a trace in sexual and/or gender dissidents, is configured as an act of resistance against the denial of one’s own history and one’s own life. The fear of erasing the traces of existence is activated in the archive and proclaims it as a tool of vindication and as a mechanism for collecting memory for the future, for those to come. This gesture generates a concrete movement that breaks with neoliberal linear temporality and challenges the blunt division between living and dying (Guerrero, 2022).

Beyond this division and using the obituaris queer project as an excuse, I intend to talk about death in the space of the archive. To talk about the dead and the living, about how they affect each other, about how they exist together, about joint desires, about dialogues, about post-mortem militancy, about last and first political or affective wills, and about the possibilities of weaving resistance against the cisheterosexual violence of oblivion.

The project is accompanied by Renata Gelosi.

LINK:
instagram