An art project created specifically for a festival RÉSISTANCE in Paris, held from June 25 to 27, 2025, at the 11th arrondissement Town Hall and at Hôtel de Ville.
This is a series of free verse poems (in the author’s own English translation) and illustrations about queer people during wartime and in the context of historical memory. My co-author, the artist Tjana, and I came of age on the banks of a great European river. Later, we both experienced migration — different in form, yet equally transformative. And when we were growing up, we invented a shared kind of freedom, even if it seemed impossible, and opposed it to the violence of everyday life. We often spoke about our family memories and about people from the past — those who, despite everything, give us strength when we think of them, missing them on the shores of the ancient river.
This project is infinitely important to us for several reasons.
The first reason is that it feels deeply familial. It’s a story about us and about our loved ones, persecuted across different decades. None of them — nor us — sought to become part of history. It just happened that way. But we truly want to overcome oblivion and preserve the memory that we — and they — existed.
The second reason is that the overwhelming majority of wartime stories are told by heterosexual normative men, and their protagonists are the same normative men. In rare cases, war is described by heteronormative women. We see this as a monopolization of the right to speak — and we want to challenge it.