Fabric: Raveling/Unraveling
was a participatory visual arts project exploring LGBTQI experiences of home.
The texts in this installation were distilled from 16 queer and trans people’s stories of “home” and “place.” Storytellers ranged in age from late teens to late sixties, and had spent between 40+ years and 3 weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area. Throughout the two weeks of the exhibit, their words slowly filled the walls of the house, along with handwritten stories generated during two participatory workshops.
In the context of escalating evictions throughout the Bay Area, queers occupy a complicated role, both as people at risk for displacement and sometimes as first-wave gentrifiers. Many of us migrated to urban centers in response to prior uprootings—by economics, by violence, by homophobia.
What does “home” look like when you pull it out of a particular building, or neighborhood or geography? When circumstances move us, willingly or unwillingly, how do we take “home” with us? How do we prepare to make new home in new places, and who do we prepare to make it with?
Fabric: Raveling/Unraveling was part of Passage and Place and the 2014 National Queer Arts Festival. Installed at Alley Cat Books on a rapidly-gentrifying commercial street, from June 1st-14th 2014.
