VISUAL HISTORY OF LGBTIQ+ IN AUSTRIA AND BEYOND

Queer has a history and it can be shown. The only question is how, since representations of queer lifestyles were forbidden in Austria until the mid 1990s by harsh criminal legislation. In accordance with the ban on advertising and clubs in effect until 1996, queer lifestyles were mostly ignored historically in films and on television and when they were not, they were represented and reproduced more so as a history of oppression. As a result, the audiovisual traces of the LGBTIQ+ community that we find outside of official representations and state control, are even more important namely, in so-called ephemeral films and videos: home movies, amateur films, films documenting political and social movements, and campaign videos, i.e., recordings made outside of industrial and artistic distribution contexts. From small-gauge filmmaking into the 2000s, we find testimonies of a multi-faceted, diverse and transnationally active queer culture over the decades. Under the working title Rainbow Films, the Austrian Film Museum in collaboration with the Österreichische Mediathek, QWIEN Zentrum für queere Geschichte, STICHWORT Archiv der Frauen- und Lesbenbewegung as well as the Schwules Museum Berlin and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History has begun a long-term project to collect these films and videos. The material collected so far comprises a running time of more than several thousand minutes. The VISUAL HISTORY OF LGBTIQ+ IN AUSTRIA AND BEYOND project analyses, first, the audiovisual, ephemeral self-documentation of the LGBTIQ+ community in and with connections to Austria. From living room settings to activist films, the material is a resource for emancipatory utopias of subjectivity, sociality and collectivity: it tells us the story of forms of collective living in precarious and crisis-laden contexts, and seems relevant and actual for all of society: how does one live in times of collapsing democracy, of repression, racism, hate, and homo and transphobia? Queer history as a subcultural history is always, also, a history of spaces, whether local or virtual, in which something is possible. This is why the project does not approach the films and videos as private documents, but contrary to the ubiquitous privatization of contemporary life as the ephemeral spaces of a secret public. The project goal is to produce an audiovisual history of the LGBTIQ+ movement and daily life as well as to develop curatorial strategies for its presentation. The latter presents challenges t o visual and data ethics. There is a thin line between empowerment and vulnerability: in view of the fragility of ephemera, the challenge is how to deal with material from so-called visual minorities. What are the possibilities between archival confidentiality and haphazardly uploading media to a cloud? How does one deal with visual gaps? What strategic role do the arts play?

The history of LGBTIQ* in Austria has often been told through the lens of laws and legal frameworks, shaped by decades of state persecution and social marginalization: as a story of living in secrecy, of victimhood, and hiding. The project Visual History of LGBTIQ+ in Austria and Beyond offers a different perspective by focusing on filmic self-documentation. Amateur films and home movies form its foundation. Despite the anti-homosexual advertising ban in place until 1996, which also applied to film recordings, and ongoing social discrimination, several thousand films documenting everyday life and activism within the LGBTIQ* community were created between 1900 and 2010. Many of these films, offering a queer point of view, were collected and preserved in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, the Austrian Mediatheque, the QWIEN Center for Queer Culture and History, and the STICHWORT Archives of the Women's and Lesbian Movement. The project aimed to establish an archival infrastructure for this ethically sensitive material through collective viewing and decision-making, involving contemporary witnesses and younger actors and activists. The materials were partly obtained through public collection calls by the Film Museum in cooperation with QWIEN and partly located in queer movement archives or other community contexts, including Aidshilfe Wien. In light of the resurgence of homo- and transphobic, misogynistic, and racist forces, it was necessary to develop a model that enables access while ensuring protection from hostile use. The resulting data management model combines the expertise of multiple archival infrastructures and organizes several thousand objects within a reference system. It provides information on holdings in the partner archives, where the films are now accessible at varying levels suited to protection needs and audiences, from the general public to community-internal access. Decisions about accessibility were guided by a specially developed, community-based viewing strategy ("Seherfahrungsräume"), implemented in collaboration with institutions such as the Homosexual Initiative Vienna (HOSI) and the Queer Museum Vienna (QMV). Alongside the cataloguing of newly collected films, already archived public holdings - including all LGBTIQ*-related television content from the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) and relevant ephemera from queer archives - were integrated into the reference system. Because of protection and neglect, these materials were often difficult to locate or invisible in official archives due to insufficient metadata and are first accessible through a low-threshold, community-sensitive approach. Around 1,000 of the catalogued films and videos form the basis for a history of LGBTIQ* reconstructed through filmic spaces. Through this perspective, the history is revealed not primarily as a history of oppression, but as a narrative of resistance, desire, and solidarity - expressed through images and experience. It was written on the basis of the filmic and remembered spaces collectively analysed in numerous viewings.