Queering Connections
GLITCHY KINSHIP
This was the fifth iteration of the collaborative exhibition project ‘Queering Connections’. Based on an ongoing collaboration between sociologist Lizzie Reed and visual artist Milou Stella, the exhibition bought Stella’s recent work into conversation with selected Artists’ Books from the University of Southampton Library’s internationally renowned Artists’ Book Collection located at Winchester School of Art.
Connection can describe an inheritance: of stories, objects, or genetics. It can describe a link in a chain, something repeated, copied, and intertwined with what has come before. A connection can also be something we feel: kinship, belonging, the affective links we have to other people or animals, to objects, stories, or to our pasts and futures. Queering can mean a moment of interruption, change, or deconstruction. It might describe a rupture, gap or glitch in an otherwise orderly chain of copies.
Glitchy Kinship asks what happens when connections are interrupted, changed, distorted, and reconstructed. How do glitches create possibilities for new kinships between words, images, feelings, people, objects and imaginations? How can connection stretch, anchoring us to one another across time and space? In summary: what happens when ‘connection’ is ‘queered’? The pieces presented here invite you to consider what happens as we collect, connect, queer, forget, and reconstruct the personal and the socio-cultural – our environments, norms, language, and stories.
