to excavate is to destroy
Schedule
Fri Jun 25 2021 at 09:00 pm
Location
Mary's, Naturally | Houston, TX
QUEER AND TRANS ARCHAEOLOGY LIVES WITHIN THE DETERIORATIONS OF HISTORY; TO EXCAVATE IS TO DESTROY THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE HOOD, ONCE HOME AND NOW EXPLOITED HERE. RECOGIENDO PASOS, WE WALK THE STREETS TO RETRACE AND FORGET OUR MEMORIES AS WE FORESEE OUR DEATH. POLTERGEISTS EAT THROUGH WALLS AND QUAKE THE GROUND. EL PASADO AÚN ESTÁ VIVO. BACTERIOMANCY, MY ROTTING BODY, BECOMES THE WORK OF ART. SEX DECAY IS OUR RESISTANCE; THE DECOMPOSITION PROCESSES OF OUR MOVEMENTS ARE THE BUILDING SURVIVAL IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT.**
http://angel-lartigue.com/
Lartigue's work explores the relationship between the body and land through the use of "putrefaction" matter as raw material. This concentration has led them to experiment with archaeological processes of decomposition into artworks, incorporating fungi, insects, and even odors captured during fieldwork, including research training in human remains recovery at Texas’ “body farm” in 2018. Designer of 2017 label book La Ciencia Avanza Pero Yo No is part of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library rare books collection. Recommended by Italian curator Eugenio Viola, Lartigue was accepted as an honorary research fellow to the artistic laboratory, SymbioticA, part of the University of Western Australia Perth for 2020. In addition, Lartigue is a participant at the international conference Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science 2020, part of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Austria.
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http://withoutarchitecture.site/
The first brick thrown at Stonewall — what has become the origin myth for the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement signals, by way of the brick — the essential tooled apparatus of architecture, a radical indigeneity in queer engagement with the built environment. Today, the “gayborhood,” as it exists under late capitalism, is a commodity fetish on display exhibiting and marketing queerness as state-oriented activism and testifying to the depoliticization of LGBTQ+ people under a neoliberal rubric of “gay rights.” Rainbow-packaged Oreos and other late capitalism tokens re-frame the Stonewall riots' initial obstruction into a sterilized history.
without architecture, there would be no stonewall; without architecture, there would be no “brick” is a curatorially driven series of actions by a group of multidisciplinary artists whose practices are rooted in critiquing the convergence of politics and the built environment. The series draws from the unrecorded history of Mary’s Naturally, a legendary Houston gay bar and one of the oldest in Texas by the time of its permanent closing in November 2009. From Houston’s “Stonewall equivalent” to a “coffeehouse with gourmet, barista-made drinks, home-baked goods & light fare in an industrial space,” Mary’s redevelopment is a revealing allegory exposing the politics embedded within the built environment of the gay village. The exhibition series is set to occur every June at the former Mary’s outback, now a paved parking lot, running alongside the citywide and national gay pride month commemoration of the Stonewall uprising. The continual reactivation of the site also recalls and functions as a continuation of early AIDS mourning practices and works to materialize, if only briefly, the inscribed trauma of what we cannot see. The Gulf Coast Archive and Museum of GLBT History estimates that as many as 300 people were laid to rest or had their ashes scattered at the exhibition site.
without architecture, there would be no stonewall; without architecture, there would be no “brick” is presented by Junior Fernandez and S Rodriguez with support from the Station Museum of Contemporary Art and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.