Tessa Boffin: Where We Touch the Archive brings together artists, writers, performers, researchers, archivists and queer cultural practitioners to think with, through and alongside the work and legacy of Tessa Boffin.

Part of Photoworks Festival at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton.

Across performance, photography, writing, film, pedagogy and archival practice, Boffin developed ways of making and documenting queer lives that remain urgent today. Her work opened spaces for histories, bodies, desires and forms of kinship that have often been excluded, fragmented or rendered invisible within official archives. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed repository of the past, Boffin approached it as a site of encounter: something to be inhabited, questioned, reimagined and made anew.

The symposium brings together a constellation of responses to Boffin's archive and legacy. Rather than offering a single retrospective account, the programme will create a space for multiple encounters, approaches and ways of knowing.

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PROGRAMME

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Welcome and a note on THE DRAFT - Polly Wright and Jazz Swali 

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Living with Archives‍
Flora Dunster 
A reflection on ten years of working in the Tessa Boffin archive, and the affective arc of durational research. 
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Angel without a Face

Åsa Johannesson
This paper considers Tessa Boffin’s photographic practice through lesbian allegory and the studio portrait. 
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TBD: the archive and uncertainty ‍
Dana Brass
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Catch me should I fall: Held in a portrait
Leah Mclaine and Danit Ariel
A discussion between curator Danit Ariel and photographer Leah Mclaine on themes of care, bravery, desire and play in the practice of making portraits and across Tessa Boffin’s archive.

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Not an object to my subject 
Sophie Mak-Schram & Erin Holly 
A performative reading, exploring relational desire, care and consent through the text element of Sophie’s newly commissioned “asking for everything” (2026), which responds to Tessa Boffin’s archive and work.
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Where We Meet: Between Photography and Land 

Queer Grounds, Georjie from In Our Hands, Eva Jonas, Kairo Urovi, SHARP and Ricardo Reverón Blanco
A roundtable exploring how queer, collective practices can create spaces of encounter between land, photography, making and memory. We’ll consider how images can become prompts for collaboration, and how archives can remain living spaces for meeting, learning and making.
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Shreds without Showing
Sophie Seita
A lecture performance, or body talk in empty slides, will poetically and performatively engage with Tessa Boffin’s archive, and specifically her distinctly literary imagination and methods. Inspired by Boffin’s photo-theatre, Seita presents a theatre without images, or rather a translation of slides, of the archive, into text, gesture, and garment, the slide as stage. Performing in and with what she calls her AuDhD outfit, a citational garment as translated slide-proscenium, Seita made a textile piece containing all her notes, quotes, doodles, lists, gathered in and around Boffin’s archive over the summer months, alongside associations, to-do lists, and snippets of conversation, responding to Boffin’s own cataloguing impulse, her numerous annotations, quotations, and lists. 

Closing remarks ‍
Stav B

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