Relationship with the museum

We try to work both inside and outside the museum's practices, antagonizing the municipal mother and pushing the queer agenda to a more visible and integral place in her heart and mind. At the foundation of everything we do are relationships, to each other, to the museum, to the outside world.

Our relationship to the museum has always been complex.

Initially, we were invited as "constituents" to self-organize activities around queer practices in the museum. This was okay at first, but something started feeling wrong. Considering we were only paid a volunteer fee yet generating a lot of queer cultural capital for the museum, we eventually felt that under these conditions, our identities were being exploited.

One event really sedimented this feeling: a department within the museum attempted the organization of a "family drag up", an event that mimicked the format of the Museum Drag Ups that we had been organizing for a while. Their idea was to do the same thing, but make it more accessible to different generations. This was an incredible idea, except no one from our group was consulted or asked to be involved. The event did not go through but this situation was eventually resolved.

Following this, we wrote the museum a long letter describing our discontent with our position in the museum as a cheap pink coat of paint and made a two-folded request:

1. We would no longer like to be paid as volunteers for our work, but would rather be paid more fairly.
2. We wanted to be more structurally involved in the museum's curatorial practices, rather than only organize events.

To our surprise, their response to our request was "yes" and "yes". It was explained to us that somewhere in the initiative of becoming a "Constituent Museum", there was the hope that constituencies would eventually become more involved in the museum's structures and "co-constitute the museum. The ensuing conversation we had launched two parallel work trajectories that reformed our relationship with the museum:

1. We were invited to actively review, inspect and comment on the up and coming "Delinking and Relinking" permanent collection presentation as it was being designed, curated and produced. This gave us insight into how they worked as well as the possibility of arguing towards changes that we thought would be more appropriate.
2. We proposed and embarked on the Love Letters project, a hotline and audio tour for the collection presentation that weaved together poetry we wrote, a phone line and spoken love letters from museum visitors into an audio-based conversation-in-the-making.

The success of these collaborations was followed by an open invitation from the museum for us to request project-based funding from them. Our relationship to the museum since then has been marked by multiple project proposals and executions and mediated by an internal constituent coordinator for the museum.