Oral historians often work with physical space in mind. At the very least, we conduct our interviews in quiet spaces that are hospitable to reflection and capturing crisp interview audio. If the project permits, interviews might be conducted in spaces significant to the histories being told for the historical record. The most public history-minded researchers may even return the histories to significant physical spaces, inviting the communities they belong to and the publics that frequent those spaces to engage with the collected material. An invitation to reflect and share, an invitation to return, and an invitation to remember and learn in the geographies that bind us to time. 

Getting people to accept these invitations is one of the most difficult aspects of oral history research. The last invitation, where communities and publics encounter their histories in the spaces that they happened, is often the hardest to deliver.

The LGBT Purge– Survivor Stories project, supported by the LGBT Purge Fund, produced a digital series dedicated to the survivors of Canada’s LGBT Purge — one of Canada’s longest and most violent state-sanctioned homophobic and transphobic programs, running from the 1950s to 1992. Under the campaign, LGBTQ+ employees were identified and purged from the military and Federal Public Service. The 44-video-long series, comprised of 5- to15-minute oral history interview clips, has amassed 6100 views on YouTube since its publication from September 2021 to January 2022. For queer communities, the opportunity to hear digestible and accessible soundbites directly from survivors of the Canadian LGBT Purge is exciting. We rarely get to hear about our histories at all, never mind from queer elders that were exiled into silence by the Canadian government. But alas, there’s a caveat: the LGBT Purge is a nearly invisible historical event for most Canadians. How can you learn about something that you aren’t even aware took place?

Often, the invitation for queer communities to learn about their histories requires the historian to make the imperceptible past unavoidably visible, to demand a confrontation with silent histories in the public spaces to which they’re implicitly tied.

Emerging Public Historian, Sammy Holmes, imagined such a confrontation through “Projecting the LGBT Purge: The Untapped Potential of Projection Mapping in Queer Public History.” Conceived as a final project for a course in Digital History at Carleton University, “Projecting the LGBT Purge” uses projection mapping — a technique that transforms any surface into a canvas for displaying video — to project video oral histories from the LGBT Purge- Survivor Stories project onto the side of the Department of National Defence Headquarters Building, the birthplace of the Purge against queer civil servants and members of the military. For Holmes, the ability to reflect survivor stories on the face of the very building that inflicted the initial violence stages a confrontation with the significance of place. These projections create spaces of resistance to challenge Canadian state violence and the erasure of queer history. Holmes’ project reminds us that the environments we walk through aren’t neutral, reflecting voices of the past back onto the geographies that produced them in the first place. 

And yet, her project is aspirational. Oral history projects seldom have the funding (let alone permissions) to embark on public outcomes as large in scale as Holmes’ proposal. It’s no mystery why so many oral historians settle on digital-based public outcomes for their projects. Funding aside, the tension between physical and digital public outcomes is palpable; physical installations are packed with accessibility concerns, while digital installations lack the je ne sais quoi of being present. A world with the funding required to bring this project to fruition would present new challenges: how might we reach publics beyond the physical spaces that the projections occupy? What happens when invitations to engage become confrontations instead? I look forward to a world with those challenges.

Until then, we have the opportunity to imagine what could be possible. Listen to the full interview to hear Holmes’ thoughts on the significance of space in oral/public history, guerilla narrative methodology, and process-based knowledge and collaboration.