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Paper short abstract

In July 2023 I collaborated with a South African film crew to animate a 1930s South African queer photographic archive. Archival, film, and imagined worlds collided as we lent our bodies to the archive, performing the archive's visual aspirations through our own movements and cohabitation.

Paper long abstract

The living core of my PhD is Seasons of Longing, a short film and collaborative archival intervention. It imagines the moments before and after photographs made by Irene ‘Freddie’ Heseltine in 1930s South Africa of her life partnership with Petronella ‘Nell’ Van Heerden, and their queer inscriptions of freedom and futurity on the racialised South African landscape.

The colliding elements of ‘real,’ archival, imagined and film worlds amplified one another as our mostly queer and person of colour crew lived, worked, narrated and reimagined the colonial era South African home and farm that was the site of this layered storytelling—and that of my own family history. Our embodiment of the archive’s visual aspirations of queer freedom and futurity marked the landscape alongside the actor’s performances. Behind the scenes videos and photographs created the sensation of an ever moving stage, capturing each of us as hushed audience and emotive character alike in shared exploration of queer belonging.

The lending of our bodies to the performance of our encounters with the photographic archive and its visual aspirations acted as a kind of theatre, “trick[ing] the senses into believing that another destiny is possible” (Lalu, Undoing Apartheid, p. 20). Discussions with both film screening audiences and crew kept returning to not just the film as its own object of creative transformation but the filmmaking as a series of intricate, interpersonal technical devices collapsing temporal and spatial divisions as it generated historical enquiry, potential queer futures, and recast relation to landscape and ‘home.’