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 will bring 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.

Over the course of the symposium, new performance, readings, a roundtables, screenings and in conversations will unfold alongside and in response to Boffin's work. Artists and contributors have been invited to bring their own practices into dialogue with the archive through embodiment, memory, documentation, intimacy and visibility.

Full programme to be announced shortly.

‍