The Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga recently released the latest issue of their serial broadsheet, SDUK. About the issue, The Blackwood writes:

This milestone fifteenth issue, CONFIDING, addresses trust and collaboration: the tools, methods, and strategies collaborators use to build mutual confidence while working together. With an international slate of largely co-authored contributions, this issue models forms of experimental and collaborative authorship through letters, exercises, interviews, oral histories, and more.

Among the list of co-contributors are Collaboratory Director, Elspeth Brown and me (Alisha Stranges), Research Manager and lead Oral Historian for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP). Our co-authored essay, “The Pussy Palace Oral History Project: Sensory Portraits of Public Sex,” features a reflection on the experience of investigating narrators’ sense memories of the Pussy Palace.

Many thanks to Elio Colavito (PPOHP Co-Oral Historian), Ayo Tsalithaba (PPOHP Creative Producer), and all our project narrators, especially Robin Woodward, whose collaboration during the interview and research creation processes shaped our findings.

Although the essay focuses on the evolution of our Sensory Portrait video shorts, which feature the sense memories of individual narrators, The Blackwood team was eager to hear from multiple narrators. Sprinkled throughout the piece are block quotes, highlighting selected memories of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of the Palace. The beauty of sense memories, of course, is their aesthetic quality, which cannot quite express itself through language alone. The tenor of the narrator’s voice often communicates more than the meaning of their words, allowing us to access a kind of “impossible” knowledge that invites insights about the past otherwise omitted from strictly empirical historical accounts

On a whim, The Blackwood proposed that we create a short video exploring how narrators responded when we asked them to express their memory of the physical space through a single colour. 

Video production is always a daunting task, especially for us, because unlike the traditional production process, where the film’s script guides the principal photography, we must uncover the film’s “script” (so to speak) among the hours of interview footage that’s already been collected and archived. The Blackwood’s enthusiasm for the material, however, provided the inspiration we needed to dive back into the oral history interviews and begin creating. 

Across our 36 narrators, remarkably, the full spectrum of colour is represented. How very queer!

Remembering in Colour, have a look.