Sex work

Judy Dunaway talks about tenor balloons, improvisation, greyhound buses, Western music, the AIDS crisis, studying with Alvin Lucier, working day-jobs and learning to play a well-tuned piano.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Judy Dunaway that we were unable to include the first time around.

Purita Pelayo is a writer, photographer and human rights activist, and a key voice in the fight for LGBITQ+ rights in the Republic of Ecuador. Her unusual sensitivity from a very young age soon blossomed into a pressing need to improve living conditions for the trans community in her country. In this podcast, we join Purita in exploring her vitality and life force, and the life that she has lived unapologetically. A sensitive woman for whom activism became one of many ways of inhabiting the world, Purita is now mainly working from the trenches of culture to preserve Ecuador’s trans memory and make it sustainable, based on a huge archive of photographs that she has taken and kept for decades. She is now focusing her energies on finding institutions willing to house her archive and disseminate its narrative through writing and outreach. 

In this podcast, we delve into the embodied history of the the Archivo Honduras Cuir, through the voices of two of its guiding lights: photographer and intuitive archivist Abigail Reyes, and photographer and cultural manager Dany Barrientos Ramírez. With them, we explore the map of the violence, displacement, resistance, and late-night parties of the trans and queer experience: an archive that began as an urgent gesture of reparation in the face of erasure and death. When friends are murdered and not a single image remains, documenting becomes a way of sustaining life over oblivion. We talk about intimate and domestic photography as a practice of resistance, about hacking newspaper archives to piece together the lives and miracles of the community’s ancestors, and about the political power of collecting images in a country that seems to avoid preservation by design. We also speak about images that are missing, and about the archive as a tool for future reparation and community healing. And we imagine the archive as swarm of fireflies: a fragile, shining, collective way of emphasising memory.