Manifesta 13 Marseille

Archival activism. Member of the Homosexual Liberation Group (GLH) from 1978 to 1987, Christian de Leusse is caught by the archives fever. He accumulated leaflets, posters, free magazines, audio and video cassettes, fanzines, books and journals and founded in 1989 in Marseille the association Mémoire des Sexualités. Associations like the gay group of AIDES Provence or the film festival Reflets donated their funds. Former activists did the same: the writer Daniel Guérin entrusted his homosexual library, Maurice Chevaly his collection of Arcadia, and many others.

In the 1st arrondissement of Marseille, in Belsunce, several tens of linear meters and some 300 gigabytes of memory document the Emergency Committee for Homosexual Repression (CUARH), Homosexual Liberation Groups (GLH) in Marseille and elsewhere, Summer Universities of Homosexualities (UEH 1979-1987, then UEEH since 1999), Pride marches, etc.

In April 2018, a new collective was formed around the desire to continue bringing this place of community and autonomous LGBTQI + memory to life. Ideas germinate and projects develop: a weekly permanence, edu-pop training and workshops, self-archiving, aperitif-boxes, landscaping of the archives’ garden, and an oral history project.

Mémoire des sexualités

Tracing homosexual history from 1978 (the beginnings of the Groupe de Libération Homosexuelle de Marseille) to 2015, the “Mémoire des sexualités” association has collated all the documentation they can find concerning the homosexual movement (militant documents, newspapers and reviews, posters, books and press cuttings telling the story of  homosexuality in national and international social and cultural life). Its exceptional documentation covers around 40 years of the history of homosexuality.

V.Jourdain and Hugues Jourdain

V.Jourdain is an artist and cultural worker. Her research and concerns have turned in recent years to the labour of art and its conditions, the representation of LGBTQI + minorities and the management of emotional memories/archives through the prism of art and activism. She wishes to open in France a feminist place of residence dedicated to research/creation for artists, activists, and researchers. She also wants to spend time building a decent collective framework for aging and taking care of herself and her community.

She invited Hugues Jourdain, her brother, to think with her about the proposal of the team of Manifesta 13’s Tiers Programme for an exhibition within Invisible Archives with the association Mémoire des Sexualités. Hugues Jourdain is an actor and director who graduated from the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris. He develops a sensitive and playful theater. He is overwhelmed by the voice of Marguerite Duras, Chekhov’s plays and the magnificent guys from American horror films of the 2000s. He staged his first show “My body that shivers” in 2017, inspired by the world of Copy. He then mounted a single actor piece adapted from Guillaume Dustan’s novel “In my room” in 2018. He is currently preparing a new creation “Last love” with which he would like to break the curse of heartache.