Capturing today, to defend tomorrow - The art of a movement.

You don’t need me to tell you what art can say of an individual, you know those brushes strokes can tell you of a family, a fraught moment, a trauma healed or a new joy found. These works can speak manifestos in to being, tell you of an artists worldview and of how they thought the world viewed them. We know this, we accept this as fundamental to art, that these are expressions of a self rendered real.

Yet when it comes to understanding others, exploring cultures and communities of those unfamiliar to us and those minorities, I don’t see people placing the importance they should on exploring the contemporary art of that group. People will look to language, food, and history, and whilst they are all important they are incomplete, they are scaffolding and bones missing the beauty of a full forms truth.

As we’ve established art contains so much of the truth of us, a truth that includes our history, our language, and adds to it that most important of ingredients, humanity. It turns dates on a timeline in to the swelling chorus of revolution, it takes records of laws and shows you the blood that ink spilled, turns a slur from a word unheard to declaration of the individual it tried to subjugate.

It is a vital part of understanding others because understanding oneself is a vital part of its creation. It is a living bridge between worldviews.

This is why the creation of art and artistic documentation of those movements from the participants in them are so important, particularly when those movements are in the minority and actively persecuted by the majority.

The hate filled, the fearful, and the heartless will unleash an outpouring of lies in service of their agenda, seeking to drown the truth out en masse. These artistic documents of truth stand as bulwark against that. Tender paintings of the individual dispels monstrous caricatures of the masses, a photograph of someone who could be anyone reminds the viewer of the humanity a poorly xeroxed leaflet tried to make them forget.

In a recent interview legendary LGBTQ+ photographer Del LaGrace Volcano was asked what they wanted of their legacy, in reply they had this to say;

“If we define legacy as what one leaves behind, then what I want is for THE QUEER F****NG ARCHIVE OF RESISTANCE to have a permanent home, in a physical place that will attract queers from all over the globe”

Del LaGrace knows the importance of this organic artistic record, for 5 decades they have recorded their experience as an intersex person and the experiences of the wider communities they are part of, or satellite to. This body of work now provides windows in to cultures that have since shifted, it provides evidence though that we were there, it captures moments of emotion of resistance of joy, the minutia and the marvellous. It is not just a documentary it is a worldview from someone who lived and experienced it.

I hope there archive comes to be to be, we need these concrete bastions of us, we need something solid so when they try to erase us they will find it far harder than simply shifting around an algorithm, and we need places where people can learn from each the not just the notes of history, as Del LaGrace says; “every night could be story night, and my voice but one in the queer cacophony of our lives”.