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LGBTQ+ Positive Voices @ Goldsmiths Launches May 2024

We are very excited to announce that the the LGBTQ+ Positive Voices @ Goldsmiths Exhibition will be launching on 7th May 2024, and will run until 20th June.

The exhibition, which is a celebration of LGBTQ+ lives and positive perspectives, will include original printed art works, video, audio, games, as well as items from the Women’s Art Library and Women’s Revolutions Per Minute collection. The Goldsmiths Special Collections and Archives material, and artistic works from 20+ creatives from around the world that make up the exhibition will be on display on the ground floor of Goldsmiths University Library.

Collage of pieces from the LGBTQ+ Positive Voices @ Goldsmiths exhibition

The creators include:

Alessandro Paiano
Magnus Thirteen
Ray Abu-Jaber
Ray Abu-Jaber and Kassie Fletcher
Yufeng Wu
Kuch Bhogal
R.E. and S.W. Lee
Leon Clowes
AnimaeNoctis
Rik Versteeg
Konrad Natthagel
Geoffrey Doig-Marx (GDM)
Guillermo “Wildo” Zayas IV
Linhtropy
Paty Rodriguez
Stefani J Alvarez
Terry Gregoraschuk
Salome Zhvania

Further details of the project can be found here.

LAUNCH EVENT

A launch event will be held on Wednesday 8th May 2024 (18:00 – 20:30). It will provide visitors with an opportunity to find out more about the project, as well as time to explore the exhibition pieces. Book your free launch event tickets here.

EXHIBITION TICKETS FOR EXTERNAL VISITORS

Visitors who are not members of Goldsmiths University Library can visit the exhibition by booking a free ticket here.

Further showcase events will be hosted during the exhibition in May and June. Details will be published both on the Goldsmiths Library blog and on the LGBTQ+ Positive Voices site.

Submissions Open For Creative LGBTQ+ Project

If you’ve been following this blog for the past few months, you will have read about the LGBTQ+ Positive Voices @ Goldsmiths Library project.

As a reminder, this project is focused on creating a collaborative exhibition to be launched during 2024 in Goldsmiths Library with a theme of positive representation and experiences of LGBTQ+ people.

The exhibition will include content from Goldsmiths University Special Collections and Archives; alongside works by individual creators.

You can find out more about the project in some of our older blog posts.

Today we are opening the form for submissions.

WHAT CAN YOU SUBMIT?

Any art or creative work by an LGBTQ+ person that fits the above theme, and can be shared or represented in a digital file format is welcome as a submission. This can include image, video, audio, text files, but is not limited to these forms only.

And if your creative work relates to or is inspired by LGBTQ+ material in Goldsmiths Special Collections and Archives, even better!

Contributions from amateur, hobby, DIY artists, crafters and creatives, those who do not consider themselves to be artists or creatives, and those who have never submitted to an exhibition before are especially welcome.

Participants must be 18 or over. Submissions will be included in the exhibition at the discretion of the organiser.

Any submission you make must be your own work and something that you are happy to be shared in a public space. You will retain full copyright of your work.

You do not need to either work or study at Goldsmiths to submit an entry.

YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS

All information submitted via this form (except email) will be included in the exhibition. If you would like your submission to appear anonymously in the exhibition, please select the option at the end of the form.

Email addresses submitted will be kept securely and confidentially and will only be used to contact you about the exhibition. They will not appear on the website.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE & GO LIVE

Call for exhibition submissions closes on 31st October 2023.

The exhibition will go live in spring 2024.

Follow the Goldsmiths Library blog for updates about the exhibition.

NEED MORE INFO?

If you’d like more information about the project, please contact a.green (@gold.ac.uk)

Ready to send your contribution? Fill in the form here.

Paper with painted rainbow hearts surrounded by artists tools.

Image by stux on Pixabay.com

A Queer Project We’re Positively Proud Of

Since beginning the LGBTQ+ Positive Voices exhibition project, I’ve been exploring Goldsmiths collections, with a lot of support from the Special Collections and Archives team, and pulling out items of interest. This has been as a way to discover items for the exhibition, and also a way to discover materials that I could use as inspiration for my own creative responses to the exhibition focus – that being “positive reflections and experiences of LGBTQ+ people”.

When I started, I wasn’t sure what shape my creative response would take. In the end, I decided to give myself some rules just so I could start creating something, rather than dithering endlessly about what form it would take. My rules were (1) create something specifically in the Special Collections space itself (2) create something no-tech/low tech/physical, rather than digital.

I’d recently discovered zines via the library’s own Liberate Zines collection, and I also came across the concept of photocopy art in the Women’s Art Library collection.

So, I took those concepts and pulled together a poster collage with a DIY feel to it, which has a focus around the portrayal of gender. Why? Because I am trans*/gender non-conforming, and I wanted to see what items there were in the collection in relation to that. I included photocopied images and “negative” text (ie white on black) by Volcano DeLagrace & J. Jack Halberstam from their Drag King Book; Tessa Boffin’s portrayal of women in masculine presentation; Invasorix tarot cards; and part of a Mandy McCarthy image in a photocopy collage.

Much of the collage comes from a lesbian, drag king, queer feminist perspective, and it was an interesting experience for me to see how that might and might not relate to my own identity as someone who is assigned male at birth.

I decided that I wanted to focus on the creators words only, so I made liberal use of highlighters on the posters to draw attention to who these artists were and draw attention to text and images they used. When I looked at what I’d pulled together/repurposed, and was wondering why this collage of unrelated artists and their thoughts made sense to me, I realised it was a focus on the idea that we can “do” gender however we want to and that’s okay.

As a creative practice, it was useful for me to look at materials I wasn’t aware of, and discover new artists myself. When I was talking to the SCA team about the project and things I was interested in seeing, thanks to their knowledge of the collection and broader thinking they introduced me to all the artists I mentioned above and took me in a direction I had not realised I would go in. The exhibition is about positive experiences/perspectives of LGBTQ+ people, and I wanted this piece to be about things that were positive to me in relation to my identity, and I expected that to come from AMAB bi and trans* perspective – so it was interesting to see that it didn’t work that way. The positivity of this piece in relation to how I felt was gained from an entirely different direction.

Here are a few images of the “Do Gender However It Works For You” work in progress in different stages. Just so you can see how it came together.

A few of the original sources

Content scaled up and photocopied as negatives

Paper folding, sticking and test colouring with highlighters

Photocopied collage and more colour tests

Completed piece?!? Maybe!

We have another workshop for the exhibition coming up on the afternoon of 10th August 2023, which is open to all (including anyone from outside of Goldsmiths University). We’d like anyone who wants to get involved in contributing to the exhibition to come along. The workshop will give people the chance to learn about the project, including how you can get involved. And we’ll share some of Goldsmiths University Special Collections and Archives collection with you to spark ideas about how LGBTQ+ lives can be revealed, celebrated and portrayed positively through it. Getting involved could mean one of many things – create a piece for the exhibition; pull out materials from the collection that speak to you in a positive way from an LGBTQ+ perpspective; contribute a character to a pixel style game; or share your own positive experiences in whatever form you want to.

You can book your place at the workshop here: https://libcal.gold.ac.uk/calendar/SCA/LGBTQPositive3

Ash Green (LGBTQ+ Positive Voices @Goldsmiths curator)

Share Your Pixel Pride – Collaborate On A Game

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know that the Special Collections and Archives team is working with Ash Green (they/them) to create an exhibition of LGBTQ+ positive perspectives.

Tied in with this, for Pride month there’ll be a drop-in event in Goldsmiths University Library with the aim of creating a collaborative game (using Bitsy) that will give LGBTQ+ people the opportunity to share snippets of their positive experiences, lives and perspectives.

The event will take place on 27^th June between 12:30 and 14:30, in the Library (Ground floor, in front of the big screen near the cafe).

No Programming, Coding Or Game Making Experience Needed To Participate

This will be a no-tech game making session, with contributors drawing 8×8 characters and writing their dialogue on paper. The characters will be added to a Bitsy game to be created for the 2024 exhibition.

If you’re not sure what you want your character to say, you can take inspiration from some of the LGBTQ+ themed Special Collections & Archive material we’ll have available during the event.

What’s A Bitsy Game?

As mentioned earlier, we’ll be using Bitsy to create the game. This is a great free little game making tool that lets you create retro style narrative pixel games without needing to be a programmer. Take a look at some examples of Bitsy games here: https://itch.io/games/tag-bitsy

You Could Probably Even Contribute in 5 Minutes

Though the event lasts for 2 hours, you can turn up at any time and leave at any time too. It might just take you 5 minutes to draw your 8×8 pixel character, write down the words it will say in the game, and then you’re done. 😊

So, come join us for the event on 27^th June and share your Pixel Pride.

Find out more here.

Plans for LGBTQ+ Positive Voices @ Goldsmiths Library

Be Part of the Creative Celebration of LGBTQ+ Lives at Goldsmiths Library

Curating LGBTQ+ Lives Online for the UK Web Archive

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I joined Goldsmiths University earlier this year as the Library Service Systems Assistant Technician. Alongside this, I also volunteer at the British Library (focused on games events and web archiving), and am also on the Committee for the CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) LGBTQ+ Network. Both British Library and CILIP volunteer roles now overlap through the LGBTQ+ Lives Online web archiving project, as I’m one of two co-lead curators on that project. As well as sharing the project here, I’ll also be presenting it in a Library all-staff meeting in June. And as June is Pride month, it’s an appropriate time to do that.

When the internet first rose to prominence in the late 1990s, one of the primary modes of communicating with others was through internet chat rooms and forums. Suddenly, isolated people all over the world with a personal computer and internet access could communicate with others ‘like them’. It is perhaps partly for the need to feel more connected with other people ‘like them’ that LGBTQ+ people adapted to online community-building quickly. Now, as we have been living online for over 25 years, it seems pertinent to consider what traces of early digital lives survive, and how we can begin to make sense of it. What survives of digital campaigns to legalise the age of consent for all sexualities in the UK (2001), gain recognition and protections of members of the trans community (Gender Recognition Act 2004) or the battle for marriage equality in the UK (England and Wales, 2013, Scotland 2014, Northern Ireland 2019)? As well as historical content such as this, we must also ensure we are ready and able to curate current and future online discussions and websites surrounding LGBTQ+ lives as well.

UK websites have been archived on a permissions basis since 2005 via the Shine interface. This changed with the implementation of Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations. As a result, since April 2013, through the UK Web Archive, the British Library along with the other five UK Legal Deposit Libraries (National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin Library), has run an annual domain crawl of the UK web. Following on from this, in 2020, the British Library and Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) LGBTQ+ Network began a collaborative project to develop the LGBTQ+ Lives Online. This project tags and subject categorises relevant LGBTQ+ websites already in the UK Web Archive, and is expanding the scope of LGBTQ+ websites we collect for future generations.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Pexels.

The collection currently contains over 400 sites and web pages in the main collection, with more of these being added to sub-collections every week. Many of the sites were already in the UKWA before the collaboration began, but were not linked to sub-collections. We are still at the stage where we are developing the structure of sub-collections, but our initial indexes cover:

Activism/Pride
Arts, Literature, Music & Culture
Business/Commerce
Education
History
Health and Community
Policy and Legislative Change
Religion
Social Organisations
Sport

LGBTQ+ content was already part of the UK Web Archive before the collaboration began, with many sites in other UK Web Archive collections overlapping LGBTQ+ themes. For example, Black and Asian Britain (blackgayblog.com), Gender Equality (Beyond the Binary), Sport (Graces Cricket Club). And some sites cut across many collections, highlighting the intersectional nature of the UK Web Archive. For example, Gal-Dem features in the News Sites; Zines and Fanzines; Black and Asian Britain; Gender Equality; Women’s Issues; Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights collections, as well as LGBTQ+ Lives Online. LGBTQ+ Lives Online, much like the lived experience of the LGBTQ+ community does not sit in isolation, disconnected from other aspects of UK offline and online life. LGBTQ+ people play a part in all aspects of the UK community, and are not solely defined by their gender or sexual orientation.

Since the launch of this collaborative project, we have been focused on a few areas to both develop the project and to preserve sites within the collection. This includes:

Identifying sites already in the UK Web Archive to be added to the LGBTQ+ Lives Online sub-collections.
Identifying new sites not already in the UKWA to be included in the collection.
Spreading the word about the project as widely as possible via blog posts and articles such as this; social media; emails targeting specific LGBTQ+, library, and broader diversity organisations and networks.

We would especially like to see more nominations that reflect the multicultural nature of UK LGBTQ+ communities, including UK sites written in languages other than English.

Under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013, the UKWA can archive UK published websites, but are only able to make the archived version available to people outside the Legal Deposit Libraries Reading Rooms, if the website owner has given permission. You can browse through the collection here, and nominate a UK published site or webpage with a focus on LGBTQ+ lives to be included in the collection via: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate .

You can read more about the LGBTQ+ Lives Online project at: https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/lgbtq/

Ash Green (Goldsmiths Library, Systems Assistant Technician)

Steven Dryden (British Library)

UK Web Archive Lead Curators for LGBTQ+ Lives Online

Content in this post originally appeared on the British Library UK Web Archive blog, and has been adapted under a Creative Commons license.