Ryan Conrad & Liam Michaud
queer cartography: mapping public pleasures, risk, safety
Queer cartography: mapping public pleasures, risk, safety questions our understandings of risk and safety as queer men. The project foregrounds a sexual politic, that resists both the homophobic pathologizing and safer sex paranoia of the conservative right and the liberal left. By contesting current discourses around what and where constitutes “safe” sex with erotic Polaroid photography and intimate testimonial, we seek to catalyse conversations that counter the erasures and dogma that mark existing safe sex discourse.
The project consists of a process of map-making by pairing enlargements of erotic Polaroid photographs and written narrative testimonials in broadsheet sized enlargements posted, in contravention with municipal bylaw demarcating “legitimate” venues of sexual expression, in public sex environments throughout Montreal. Posting the images and texts across a host of historical, political and affective spaces produces a geographic constellation of sites of pleasure, of risk, and of queer male sexual intimacies.
Our investment is to forge a creative counter-prevention practice nearly three decades since the AIDS crisis began, and at a moment when we are told AIDS is over. This work is built around lived negotiations of pleasure and violence that structure queer life. In the process, we seek to rewrite the ways we talk about risk and desire.
*Please refer to postcard insert included in the program for further insight on the project.
Biographies:
Ryan Conrad is an outlaw artist, terrorist academic and petty thief finishing an MFA at the Maine College of Art while living part time in rural Maine and Montreal. Conrad’s work is archived at www.faggotz.org and he is the editor of www.againstequality.org.
Liam Michaud was among the angry handful of dykes and faggots that started the Prisoner Correspondence Project, a project seeking to support LGBTQ prisoners (www.prisonercorrespondenceproject.com) and in the process, forge cultures of queer self-determination and self-defense. From rural western Quebec, and now living in Montreal, he commits his time to forging a radical creative HIV prevention practice rooted in harm reduction and queer history.
