As part of CRUISING GROUND, LUX and CRUSEV commissioned artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay to produce a new work in response to some of the ideas and themes explored during the past year of programming and research. TREES ARE FAGS takes the form of an audioguide combining narrated passages and a score of gestural cues, inviting the participant to apply the choreography and aesthetics of cruising to a walk in a park or forested area, or anywhere where trees are visible. The audioguide is programmed to select and shuffle narrated and musical material, making the listening experience unique for each participant.
The work has also been developed in response to LUX’s geographical location and is part of the LUX Collection, available on a number of devices that can be borrowed from the organisation’s space in Waterlow Park. In addition to these, the work is also accessible on personal devices anywhere via the Internet and will therefore be translatable to any number of locations and sites – limited only by the audience’s imagination.
The work is now live and can be experienced at: www.lux.org.uk/trees-are-fags
Co-commissioned with CRUSEV as part of the ongoing research project and public programme CRUISING GROUND.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is an artist, diarist and correspondent. His artistic work mediates emotional encounters with musical, art historical and Queer cultural material, encouraging deep listening and empathic viewing. In his work you will find bells, bouquets, ceramic vases, enchanted forests, folding screens, gay elders, glitter, gold leaf, love letters, imaginary paintings, madrigals, megaphones, mirrors, naked men, sex-changing flowers, sign language, subtitles, and the voices of birds, boy sopranos, contraltos, countertenors, and sirens. Nemerofsky’s work has been exhibited internationally, and is part of the permanent collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Thielska Galleriet Stockholm and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. www.nemerofsky.ca
CRUISING GROUND
First initiated at LUX in Summer 2017 in response to the organisation’s relocation to Waterlow Park, Highgate in North London, CRUISING GROUND takes the the ponds and cruising areas of neighbouring Hampstead Heath as a departure point for exploring the methodologies of cruising as a strategy for permanent institutional destabilisation and for queering cultural mediation and production within the arts. This ongoing research project and public programme has been developed and curated by Matt Carter in collaboration with Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV).
CRUSEV
Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV) explores LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) social and sexual cultures of the 1970s, and their significance for LGBTQ people across Europe now and in the future. CRUSEV reconstructs aspects of LGBTQ cultures and interactions from the 1970s, the decade before HIV/AIDS, to consider what this knowledge can contribute to queer politics and identity in Europe’s present and future. The three-year research project is financed by the European funding agency HERA, under HERA’s ‘Uses of the Past’ theme. www.crusev.ed.ac.uk // @cruisingthe70s
