Brooke Palmieri is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
As a writer and artist that draws on the long history of gender nonconformity in my work, a driving force behind my practice is the idea that a longing for history will always be a fundamental aspect of humanity, so long as memory itself serves as a foundation for human consciousness. Everyone has a history, but the majority of people are not taught how to look back in order to find it. One problem is the depth and breadth of our losses. People and their prized possessions are destroyed by accident and by design throughout history: armed conflict, invasion, willful destruction, natural disaster, decay. Then there is the fantasy of destruction, a destructive force in its own right, the perception that nothing survives. That fantasy begets a reality of its own: because I don’t go looking for what survives, I don’t find it, or I don’t recognize it when I see it. This is true across subcultures and among historically marginalized or oppressed groups, and for the queer and trans subjects whose histories I am interested in recovering in particular. In the twenty-first century, access to queer and trans history is an accident of birth: knowing someone in your family or neighborhood, living in a place where it isn’t legislated against, going to a school that dares teach it, affording admission into one of the universities that offers classes on it.
research process tends to triangulate between the archive of my own weird and imperfect human experiences and the debris I collect around them, small collections amassed by and for queer and trans people, and larger institutions that also contain relevant material that begs to be recontextualized. Or to make it personal: to write my upcoming book Bargain Witch: Essays in Self Initiation, I used my journals and the to look at old websites I’d made when I was 14, the archive of the⁴in Philadelphia where I grew up, and special collections at major institutions like the the at Northwestern University, and the in London. All my adult life I’ve made pilgrimage between the intimate domestic spaces where people preserve their own histories, to local collections set up on shoestring budgets as a labor of love, to the vast, climate-controlled repositories of state and higher education that have more recently begun to preserve our histories, each enhancing what it is possible for me to know
