Essential Information
| Type | Talks and tours |
|---|---|
| Location | |
| Date and Times | Wednesday 6 September - Sunday 10 September 2023 |
To celebrate Pride along the Thames, arts organisation Avant-Gardening/Bijou Stories is launching a new project to sprinkle some glitter and groove into the streets of Lewisham and Greenwich.
Join us at Royal Museums Greenwich for a week of events designed and delivered by our LGBTQ+ community-led research project participants. From talks to crafting sessions, get ready for a season of conversation and creativity.
Event programme
Creative Workshop: Queer Love Tokens
Sunday 10 September, 2pm-4pm | National Maritime Museum, Group Space
In this special creative workshop, you will write and decorate love letters for long dead queer guys, says event host and artist and historian, Ema Sala.
You will be introduced to cute sailors and their stories, while reflecting on gender variance in the nineteenth century. Join Ema to look at examples of Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB) people sailing as men in the military and Merchant Navy.
Suitable for 18+
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Attitudes: A Nelson/Hamilton Affair
Thursday 7 September, 6pm-9pm | Queen’s House
Join us for an evening of life drawing, live music, zine making and conversation centred around icons of maritime history.
Led by researchers K.A. Harper, Jas Bevan Niss and Rose Power, this event showcases their initial findings from the LGBTQ+ community-led project at Royal Museums Greenwich.
Suitable for 18+
Visit Attitudes
Image: Mal Parry
Family Friendly Workshop: Polar Explorer's Sea Chest
Sunday 10 September, 11am – 4pm| Learning Space, National Maritime Museum
What did polar explorers wear on their long voyages into the Arctic and Antarctic regions? Come and make your very own paper doll outfits in this drop-in craft session.
Together we will explore examples of Victorian and Edwardian fashion - both civilian and seafarer clothing - as well as historical and more modern polar gear.
Live Art: Fag Ends
*** POSTPONED due to illness ***
Fag Ends is a multi-stranded, ongoing work, in which the artist stages the trans body as a site of un-remembering. Using centuries-old tobacco-pipe shards mudlarked from and returned to the Thames, they mark out a map of queer time, traced in the surrogate bones of the unknowable dead.
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This performance features interventions from SL Grange's Smoke Trails poetry improvisation. Poet SL Grange will generate text in conversation with these unknown others, allowing them to speak back. Voicing both materials and lives that have been marginalised, discarded or erased, the resulting poetry also generates and leaves gaps into which the living and the dead dream each other.
It will be possible to engage with the event from the walkway above or on the foreshore itself; please note, the foreshore is unstable terrain and caution is advised. The performance will take place between low and high tide (timings are approximate and depend on conditions).
Find out more about Smoke Trails
Image: Mal Parry