I’m Staying with You: Archival Bequeathments in Trans Media Cultures

The misinformation campaign that claims transgender people “don’t exist” correlates to the erasure and neglect of trans history and heritage in national, institutional, and community archives worldwide. What kinds of archival and artistic sources provide evidence of the plenitude of trans lives? Artistic experiments with historical documents and records but also gossip and ephemera signals a productive and transformative form of engagement that highlights the malleability and multiplicity of the archival evidentiary paradigm. How do artists interpret and take up such bequeathed heritage? Analyzing the replay and recreation of audio-visual records in Dear Lou Sullivan (Rhys Ernst, 2014) and I’m Staying (Holly Revell & Travis Alabanza, 2019) I look to how these “artchival objects” concentrate and facilitate intergeneration transmission and (dis)identification. I argue that archival bequeathment is not unidirectional – a donor to the archive – but also involves the artist’s acknowledgement of the gift.