There’s Room Enough in Paradise (2022-2023)
This audiovisual project documents the preservation of gay and trans folksong. In each chapter of this project, songs from the first wave of Gay Liberation Movement are taught by queer elders to members of younger generations. The lyricism and soundtrack to street-based movements of resistance from Stonewall to rural self-defence projects, There’s Room Enough in Paradise presents the act of preservation itself as a historically important performance: an ethnographic recording of the song is not enough to preserve these songs, this project suggests. The time and space for intergenerational gathering are integral to making culture into the future. Home-fermented fruits of the collective harvest are offered to the ground in libation rituals of homecoming and remembrance.
4K video, 00:07:37 ∞, (single channel video); 00:15:00 (multiple channel installation version)
Exhibitions
‡ Ferments, Family, Kinship, Home moving image video program, curated by Lauren Gabrielle Fournier for Images Festival (Toronto, 2023); Exhibition information;