UNTOLD STORIES: SAPPHO: CREATING OUR QUEER LANDMARKS
2024
Artists Bex Harvey and Sarah Li worked with the young people from the Youth Hub at Dawdon Youth and Community Centre (DYCC), exploring the archives from Durham University, Greek mythology, specifically the story of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos.
This new creative collective discovered that Durham Castle has a bust of Sappho, influencing conversations and many questions, perhaps the most thought-provoking being, “Are there any queer* landmarks in Durham?”
The project flag, “Queer Landmarks’, displayed at Dawdon Youth & Community Centre, Youth Hub. 2024.
With support from the artists, the group created their own Queer Landmark, situated at DYCC (and temporarily at the entrance to Durham Castle during Durham Pride 2024). They created a flag to be flown on site, that is intended to travel around the county for relevant events as this work progresses.
The group co-created and curated an exhibition of all of the work made throughout the workshops with the artists, proudly culminating in a public gathering for a parade and exhibition at DYCC.
The exhibition and parade featured specially designed and handmade garments, adorned with carefully embroidered flowers, letters, jewellery alongside hand-made flags coloured with natural dyes the young people and artists had made together.
As a landmark to this work, there will be a flag raised at the DYCC - identifying the young peoples’ own Queer Landmark for County Durham.
*Queer definition (from Key Concepts in Body and Society)
"Queer's original meaning is ‘odd’ or ‘irregular’ but it became an insulting term for gay men, in English, around the 1920s. The political revivification of the word queer reclaims a term of vilification, in the way many marginalized or oppressed peoples have turned insults into empowering weapons of identity-formation. In doing so, queer has come to mean more than ‘gay man’. As an identity, at its widest, it includes all sexualities that are not hetero-normative. As a political practice, queering is an act of re-reading and disrupting narratives of heterogeneous hetero-normativity. As a theory and an academic practice, its agenda is to show that queerness is and always has been present across time, space and cultures."
Project Partners:
— Dawdon Youth and Community Centre (NMN Cultural hub) and the DYCC Youth Hub
— Durham University (Museum of Archaeology Durham / Durham University Collections)
— Artists Sarah Li and Bex Harvey
— Commissioned by No More Nowt and funded by funded by Arts Council England.
