Archive vivante

IRAV research team
Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin, Virginie Jordan

Scientific partner
Christiane Carri (Social Work Institute)

Funding:
IRAV (EDHEA)
Social Work Institute

In cooperation with Alpagai and QueerWallis, people from the LGBT-queer community of different generations are invited to take part in the project. The aim is to collect real-life stories and contemporary reflections through personalised interviews. These will be compiled in the form of podcasts and made available online. The interviews themselves will also be made available to the associations as archives.

Participants in the interviews will be divided into pairs, made up of people from different generations. Using a guide, they will ask each other questions about their experiences. This guide will be drawn up in collaboration with the Alpagai and QueerWallis associations under the supervision of experts. The recordings of the dialogue interviews will then be processed into podcasts.

Oral history offers the possibility of innovative history writing based on lived experience. Queer life is seen as cultural capital, and its lived stories as cultural heritage that can be preserved through archiving and podcasting. By exploring the experiences of different generations, the project seeks to highlight what separates and unites these different generations in their lives and experiences in the Valais. Generations are understood here as a social category that includes people of different ages.

The associations are involved as full partners in the conception and development of the project, and members of the associations will benefit from a workshop that will empower them to work autonomously on the further archiving of queer history in the Valais. In this way, the project will also take artistic and curatorial approaches, linked to the idea of 'evolving archives', the philosophy of the interview and 'writing performance'.

The workshop will address the spoken word as a medium of communication, audio recording, editing and post-production, providing participants with the technical skills needed to pursue the project.

Results
This project is based on the production of six podcasts (mastered by Virginie Jordan) as part of a collaboration between artists and social work experts on the subject of ‘LGBT + Valais’: the oral history of queer sexualities in Valais, bringing together archives of LGBT+ stories and real-life experiences collected in Valais. The stories are presented in the form of six podcasts and made available on online platforms and on the websites of associations and institutions (Alpagai; Queer Valais; soundcloud; EDHEA; HES-SO Valais). This living archive of testimonies to a history that is both local and global led to a second development in the form of an evening of performances entitled Queering Spaces, organised by Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin and Christiane Carri as part of the EDHEA graduation exhibition in the Halles Usego (June 2023).

The publication Archive vivante : territorialité et circularité en Valais (Living Archive: territoriality and circularity in the Valais) takes as its starting point the artistic-social collaboration and the two forms of valorisation (podcast, performance) in order to question the ways in which oral history is preserved and voices kept 'alive'.