Resisting the Museum: Archiving Trans* Presence and Queer Futures with Chris E. Vargas

The Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art reimagines the confines of an institution and delves into the historical archive carving out stories of gender transgressions and performative interventions.¹ Chris E. Vargas, the founder and artist behind MOTHA, activates the archive by listening for what exists within the silence and erasure of our queer and trans artist of color histories. In our conversation,² we shared our experiences engaging different archives and collections, some in libraries and cultural institutions, others under our beds and in our closets. Many of us are not documented in the archive due to systemic oppressions, but I’m entranced by how agency can exist in holding our own archives and conjuring alternative modes of hirstorical (self-)preservation beyond an institution. Excavating hirstories, herstories, queerstories, theirstories, MOTHA seeks to carve out these histories existing within the margins and deconstructs the notion that only one history exists. Not simply interested in visibility, but in a reimagination of queer pasts, presents, and futures, we flirt with truth and facts while honoring the precarious nature of history.

Imaginary and “forever under construction,”³ MOTHA continues pushing the boundaries of hegemonic narratives and advocates for the liminal spaces that appear, disappear, and reappear all at once. With the recent inclusion of select representations of trans experiences in mass media and LGBT history, MOTHA questions what stories are being told, who is telling them, and where they end up. This questioning is vital to memory trespasses, archival transgressions, and hirstorical transactions between and outside the binary. The artivation of the archive (artchive) defies historical linear, static, and binary frameworks by inspiring alternative interpretations and reimagining what is documented or not, how it got there or got lost, why it’s there or isn’t, and how to break open the hirstorical artchive.

Figure 1.

“Pronoun Showdown,” Created by Chris E. Vargas.

Hernández:

You had a residency in New York recently? How’s that going?

Vargas:

Yeah, I was just in New York for four weeks. I’m currently an artist-in-residence at the New Museum,⁴ where I’m organizing an exhibition that opens in September 2018. The show is part of my larger conceptual museum project: the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, or MOTHA. For the New Museum, I’m making an installation engaging with the complex and layered history of the Stonewall riots.

We are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, and there will be a lot of events looking back to honor and commemorate this history. As aspects of our LGBT past get disseminated in various ways, it’s a history that’s getting more widely known, but there’s still so much that’s unknown about the actual events. In fact, since day one there have been conflicting stories as to what and how it all went down that night at the bar. There’s also been a continual revisiting and recuperating of different aspects and details of the events, including different ways that people are re-inserting themselves into the history who have otherwise been overlooked in the narrative, especially queer and trans people of color.

Whenever we look back at history, it is biased and self-serving; it’s usually to narrate a particular politic and vision of our present. For example, when marriage-rights activism was at its highest intensity, people would draw a direct line from Stonewall to gay marriage that erased all the radical politics, extreme social and economic marginalization, and so many of the issues that were at stake for people involved in the Stonewall riots, especially for people of color and people who were lacking resources, like housing, employment, health care. That’s why I think it’s interesting because Stonewall is this site that people point to with all these different stories around it.

For the gallery, we are re-creating Christopher Park, which is the park just out front of the actual bar. Currently there are two pairs of sculptures there, two men...