I took my starting point from Richard Scott’s poem ‘Oh my Soho!’ in so much as I wanted to insist upon the alternative map of a place like Scott does. As I discussed, queerness can almost be seen as a shadow world that underlies the heteronormative perception of a place. I took that concept of queerness ‘underlying’ a place and tried to make it literal, exploring the undersides of streets, as if queerness became an actual bedrock for a place. I wanted to explore place through this slanted perspective, fracturing and twisting images and ideas to represent the gaining of a new perspective when you apply queerness as an ‘alternative map’ to a space.
I imagined this place as my hometown: industrial, bleak, and with an ever-rotating cast of shops and cafes. It is within this familiar setting that everything becomes unfamiliar, and belonging twists itself into both a comforting concept and something that can very easily slip through your fingers. Both place and belonging are ever-changing, twisting around each other until nothing is recognisable. How do we perform belonging when we don’t know what that looks like? How do we claim a place as our own when we don’t recognise anywhere?
Other questions also drove my writing: What does it mean to have a place and lose it? What does it mean to know yourself and then not? What do we find in the gaps of belonging, in the moments where loneliness feels bigger than us? How important is it to find belonging again, different than before but no less meaningful?
I have no answers for you, and perhaps you have more questions too, but I hope that something here resonates with you.
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