reclaim:pride

Part of Momentum, located in the West Hollywood Library Parking Garage

ONE Archives is excited to collaborate with RECAPS Magazine to infiltrate (by invitation) the upcoming Los Angeles Christopher Street West Pride Festival as part of festival’s exhibition Momentum. reclaim:pride includes original posters submitted by activists, artists, writers, and thinkers on the topic of queer resistance alongside an eclectic display of materials related to pride from the archives. The project calls attention to the radical beginnings of the pride parade as a defiant claiming of public space while connecting the archive to contemporary queer issues ignored or omitted from mainstream gay and lesbian politics. Buttons will also be distributed with both submitted designs and reproductions of radical buttons from the archives, and artist Zach Blas will conduct a project related to his ongoing series Facial Weaponization Suite.

After the exhibition, submitted works, project documentation and additional resources will be uploaded to RECAPS Magazine as a special reclaim:pride issue.

reclaim:pride is organized David Frantz, Curator at ONE Archives, and Martabel Wasserman, founder of RECAPS Magazine. Support for reclaim:pride provided by Christopher Street West.

About RECAPS

RECAPS (Reclaim Culture, Art, Politics, Sexuality) is a topically curated online magazine of new and archival material organized by Martabel Wasserman that comes out every other month. It is an exploration of virtual and embodied activism, interdisciplinary conversation and community. Our mission is to explore what emerges when content from different historical, geographical, methodological, aesthetic and political vantage points is brought together. The magazine includes work that ranges from the canonical to the provisional, the abstract to the polemical, the timely to the archival. RECAPS explores the relationship between virtual community and embodied activism. The (re)print section is the most literal example but this line of inquiry structures the entire project. RECAPS attaches uses the prefix “re” in categorizing the content because the magazine is built on the ideas that resistance is a process of repeating ideas, reworking strategies and reimaging what seems possible. “Re” reflects the belief that ideas are collectively produced and an engagement with the political present requires looking backward.

About Zach Blas

Zach Blas is an artist-theorist working at the intersections of technology, queerness, and politics. He is currently developing a series of works that responds to technological control and informatic capture through tactics of escape, disappearance, opacity, and illegibility.

He is a PhD candidate in The Graduate Program in Literature, Information Science + Information Studies, Visual Studies at Duke University. He is also creator of the art group Queer Technologies, a founding member of The Public School Durham, and a contributing editor for the online journal Version. For the 2012 – 2013 academic year, Zach is an artist/researcher-in-residence at the b.a.n.g.lab and Performative Nanorobotics Lab, part of CALIT2 and the Visual Arts Department, University of California San Diego.

Image: (hero) Richard Burckhardt, Houston gay pride parade, 1981. Richard Burckhardt Photographs. ONE Archives at the USC Libraries