BAL (Brussel Almanack Lesbian)
2018
Exhibition in collaboration with Jessica Gysel
Publication made with Loraine Furter, Roxanne Maillet and Jessica Gysel
The BAL exhibition and publication came into existence in an old industrial kitchen in connection to the 2018-edition of the bar Mothers & Daughters - a lesbian* and trans* bar*. It gathered fragments of histories made by lesbians rather than history that happened to lesbians, carried inside large paper garlands. Uncovered from Belgium’s grass-roots archives, it was a patchwork based on meticulously compiled lists. Lists of lesbian spaces, movements, bars and parties; lesbian slang and alphabets; mythologies, mysteries and manifestos.
This collection of fragments testified to the hard work, boldness and care that went into making lesbian spaces in Brussels and other spaces in Belgium. It tried to bring traces of ephemerabilia of these spaces into the light and back in our collective memory. The exhibition’s timeline started in 1953, when lesbian rights pionneer Suzan Daniel initiated the Centre Culturel Belge, the first gay and lesbian organisation in Belgium (although lesbian bars had been a staple in the city from early the 1920s.) It ended at 2003, when The Gate, Brussels last “out” lesbian bar at the time, permanently closed its doors.
This collection was not a traditional archive nor presumed to be exhaustive; it offered a patchwork stitched together from scraps left behind by a rich variety of grass-roots movements in our community. Every visitor was invited to contribute with their own stories. As the exhibition and publication was comprised uniquely of reproductions, there was a symbol next to each fragment, indicating its origin or place of safekeeping.
In a time when lesbian bars and spaces around the world rapidly were disappearing, and lesbians were again being pushed into obscurity of the public landscape, this was an invitation to be reminded of the inherited claim to existence in and as public space. To be enveloped in the sheer volume of the radical rooms in our past that helped shape the city of Brussels, and to cherish what it could mean to be in a space that held a different code of conduct and a different plan for the future than the one on the current horizon.
2018
Exhibition in collaboration with Jessica Gysel
Publication made with Loraine Furter, Roxanne Maillet and Jessica Gysel
The BAL exhibition and publication came into existence in an old industrial kitchen in connection to the 2018-edition of the bar Mothers & Daughters - a lesbian* and trans* bar*. It gathered fragments of histories made by lesbians rather than history that happened to lesbians, carried inside large paper garlands. Uncovered from Belgium’s grass-roots archives, it was a patchwork based on meticulously compiled lists. Lists of lesbian spaces, movements, bars and parties; lesbian slang and alphabets; mythologies, mysteries and manifestos.
This collection of fragments testified to the hard work, boldness and care that went into making lesbian spaces in Brussels and other spaces in Belgium. It tried to bring traces of ephemerabilia of these spaces into the light and back in our collective memory. The exhibition’s timeline started in 1953, when lesbian rights pionneer Suzan Daniel initiated the Centre Culturel Belge, the first gay and lesbian organisation in Belgium (although lesbian bars had been a staple in the city from early the 1920s.) It ended at 2003, when The Gate, Brussels last “out” lesbian bar at the time, permanently closed its doors.
This collection was not a traditional archive nor presumed to be exhaustive; it offered a patchwork stitched together from scraps left behind by a rich variety of grass-roots movements in our community. Every visitor was invited to contribute with their own stories. As the exhibition and publication was comprised uniquely of reproductions, there was a symbol next to each fragment, indicating its origin or place of safekeeping.
In a time when lesbian bars and spaces around the world rapidly were disappearing, and lesbians were again being pushed into obscurity of the public landscape, this was an invitation to be reminded of the inherited claim to existence in and as public space. To be enveloped in the sheer volume of the radical rooms in our past that helped shape the city of Brussels, and to cherish what it could mean to be in a space that held a different code of conduct and a different plan for the future than the one on the current horizon.