Fire and Ink IV “Witness”: Detroit, MI

Workshop:

Queer Blood Relations: The Thickness of Witness

Presenters: Alexis DeVeaux, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace

This is a workshop where we remember that we are related and witness each other on literal and literary terms. As an intergenerational team we will help participants map a lineage of texts that have allowed us to feel related, even when we faced isolation, and create a generative space for new texts that practice the life-saving work of witness and transformation. Using Alexis De Veaux’s Yabo and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Spill as grounding texts, this workshop will invite participants to write poems of witness for each other, testify to the queer blood connections that have made us possible, and prescribe each other life-changing literary texts. We will celebrate the family-reunion atmosphere of Fire & Ink and examine what models of being related we want to uplift and what models we want to transform.

Panel:

Dig: Queer Archeologies

Moderator: Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Panelists: Lisa C. Moore, Jonathan Bailey, Julia Roxanne Wallace and Zanele Muholi

This is a conversation for those of us who dig; those of us interested in the dirt of black LGBTQ life, love and survival; those of us discovering and offering up an archive of experience that has been buried under oppression and misrecognition. When we hold black LGBTQ lives up to the yellow light of the photographer’s bulb, the red light of the digital recording device, the bright brown light of our faces, something changes. This conversation between people who search for and document the evidence of our existence as a resource for our continued brilliance may leave you dirty, but such is the layered quality of our love. Please join us for a public conversation between black LGBTQ archivists, researchers, oral historians and documentarians and an experiential archive activity.