Participatory Trans Archiving and

Self-Actualisation at the Museum of Transology (MoT)

The Archive will not be Silent

A 9-month research project and collaboration with the Museum of Transology (MoT) trans community archive. Freya worked with volunteers at MoT to explore what the archive means to them and the trans community more widely, specifically in relation to belonging and self-actualisation.

Freya designed a series of creative, participatory methods including cultural probes and workshops featuring body mapping and collective manifesto writing.

Through these exploratory methods, the reflections, feelings, ideas and dreams of the community curators (volunteers) at MoT were gathered. Together, the co-curators and Freya painted a picture of what 'trans archiving' and the archive at MOT, meant to them.

The objects created and the insights they yielded, were brought together into dialogue through an exhibition Freya curated. This provided the space and opportunity to share what emerged and spark further reflection around trans archiving and representation.

Cultural Probes

Cultural probe activity packs were created and gifted to members of the group, to complete in their own time and gradually send back to me.

These included a range of different prompts and tasks:

Postcards to write to 'home'
Scrolls to write trans archiving manifestos
Disposable cameras to record and archive day-to-day life
Labels to identify the items in a personal trans archive

These creative, open-ended tasks led to rich, nuanced, beautiful insights.

Workshop

Graphic combining the body maps of the group

After completing the cultural probes in their own time, participants were invited to a sharing workshop, where they shared what had emerged and been created through the activities.

Freya then ran two creative activities to build on the reflection and insights that had emerged from the probes. These were:

Creating a collective manifesto painting - bringing together the different elements and ideas from their personal manifestos, into a combined image. This took the form of a tree, inspired by one of the manifestos
Body mapping - reflecting on where the archive lives within their bodies and where they feel and hold different parts of archiving and the MoT community.

abstract

This research offers insights into the worlding capacity of queer community archives, exploring their potential as active sites for self- and community- actualisation. By taking a creative/practice-based research approach, it also provides examples and inspiration for co-creating research with participants, employing methods which centre empathy, nuance and lived experience. Structured as a descriptive case study, this project was a collaboration with the Museum of Transology (MoT) – a London based trans+ community archive. Over the course of 3 months community curators (who volunteer at the archive) reflected on what trans archiving means to them personally, and how trans+ archival practices differ from their heteronormative counterparts. Through this process, the function and resource MoT offers for the London trans+ community was collectively explored. A mixed methods research design provided the framework for the study, leading with creative methods such as cultural probes and workshops to gather experiential insights. These were followed by quantitising methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Sensorimotor Norms which investigated where the archive lives in the body through plotting the sensory experiences of language. Fundamentally, an act of ‘archiving the archive’ emerged through the project, bringing the reflections, dreams, items, ideas and interpretations of trans+ archiving at MoT, into dialogue.