At the beginning of a five-year-long journey, I posed myself the initial question how to represent queer desire without falling into the traps of objectification and stereotypes. As queerness was a completely new experience for me, I plunged vigorously into reading and later teaching about queer issues, both as a part of my doctoral research and my full-time academic job. In the last couple of years, I have also involved myself into a modest amount of organizing (co-ordinating art events at Brno Pride Week, co-curating and participating in queer-themed exhibitions). In accordance to the writing of Audre Lorde, Adrianne Rich and numerous other authors, the finding for me stemming from this experience that I want to represent and work with in my art is the entanglement of the queer self in the community. Even such an intimate thing as eroticism and love between two queer people should not be understood and represented as an affair that is solely between the two of them. After all - the trope typical for homophobic propaganda - “Let them do what they want, as long as they keep it for themselves” - relegates queer intimacy precisely into the isolated, inconsequential, shameful, closet. In the social context where representations of heteronormative “sex in public” are endlessly reproduced in the hall of mirrors in economic and legal arrangements, in national and most of global popular culture, heterosexual intimacy, partnership and marriage are acts which are located in a complex social and political assemblage. A queer existence is not located only in the context of being openly politically charged in the adversarial context of the “big society” (in contrast to the naturalized agenda of heterosexuality which is presented as “common sense”). It is political also by being anchored - at least potentially - in the embrace of the queer community defined as such from within by the emphasis on shared culture, history, and lines of oppression. Taking into account precisely this context and not depicting the queer desire in isolation is something that dawned on me only gradually. While in my first explorations of queer desire in paintings and drawings I was preoccupied with the isolated romance, the Rainbow Garden project represents a conceptual departure. On one level it works with a more abstracted, distanced, and speculative appropriation of tropes associated with romance circulating in the cultural imaginary. On another level, the mutually shared and perhaps potentially processed and reworked aesthetic experience of and in the garden by the event participants and future artists in residence (as opposed to the isolated act of meditation upon an artwork in a gallery) is a dimension which is also crucial for the artwork and its spinoffs. By organizing the annual gatherings in the time of the booming of irises, there is the prospect of building up memory and affective structure around the garden, making it a the space that I dedicated to queerness not only by my own authorial intention, but also by the fact of its direct experience and use by queer people. The erotic desire which I originally depicted in my paintings that is sparkling between two queer subjects might find in the Rainbow Garden more facets, layers and structures: the desire to experience the fleeting beauty of the irises in the specific landscape, specific time, with people who might be strangers to one another but are interconnected by a shared background. It is a journey that has begun.
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