Who plans the parties for the party planners? Hosted in collaboration with QNA, this house party invites past and present queer party organizers in Los Angeles to be “archived” throughout the night by photography, videography, music, and dance.
Past queer parties have often lacked documentation and archival materials due to budget and/or an anti-survellence effort to maintain safety in privacy and anonymity. Similar efforts position the private space of a “home” or “house” as a safe and private space for the LGBTQ+ community to express love and party— increasingly now in the wake of recent gun violence and domestic terrorism in gay and queer nightclubs and bars, Pulse (2016) and recently Club Q (2022).
While the camera is often focused on the party-goer, this event reorients the gaze back to the work of queer organizing. Archiving: Queer House Party seeds the beginnings of a valuable archive of all of the queer organizers and parties in Los Angeles that have happened past and present.
R.M. Schindler’s domestic architecture opens as a space to host, document, and archive this rare and valuable moment of queer organizers in Los Angeles coming together — situating the MAK Center as a repository of a special archive for future use.
QNA L.A.
QNA (Louie Bofill, Jae-an Crisman, Paulie Morales, Ly Tran, and Howin Wong) is a Los Angeles-based collective and platform that highlights queer and trans API artists and culture through art, nightlife, and community.
SUBJECT STUDIES
This program is organized and hosted in collaboration with MAK Center Exhibitions and Programs Manager, A. Smith, and a part ofSubject Studies, a new annual program series offering practical and non-practical public engagements, initiated by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Its inaugural theme, Reorientations, developed by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu and 2022 Thomas Mann House Fellow Rosario Talevi, directs questions towards institutional habits, routines and practices through perspectives of care, repair and transformation.
This program is supported in part by the California Arts Council Recovery Grant, Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles (DCA), PICE AC/E's Programme for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture, and Thomas Mann House.
Image Credit: TAKK Architecture.
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Program
SUBJECT STUDIES: REORIENTATIONS
December 06, 2022 – December 11, 2022
