'Dying images and queer utopian memory' | Ingrid Ryberg on Moving Images Within Precarious Structures

We invited author and director Ingrid Ryberg to respond to Moving Images Within Precarious Structures, an episodic programme of events starting from the proposition that precarity is a condition of artists’ moving image practice that structures not only the ways that moving image is resourced, produced and shared but also the aesthetic and political dimensions of artists’ work. Delivered in partnership with Fine Art Research (School of Fine Art) at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) and LUX Scotland, the programme examined how ways of making, materialising and thinking the moving image can work in opposition to the conditions, effects and affects of precarity.

Moving Images Within Precarious Structures was structured by three episodes: ​‘Episode 1: A Prayer Before Birth /​Loss of Heat’, a double screening at Glasgow Women’s Library presenting two works from feminist film organisation Cinenova, newly digitised and captioned as part of their project​The Work We Share which was accompanied by a conversation between poet Nat Raha, artist Camara Taylor, chaired by artist and Cinenova working group member Moira Salt; ​‘Episode 2: Class Matters’, curated by Deborah Jackson with Michelle Hannah, Hayley Jane Dawson and the Scottish Working Class Network, at Many Studios and joined by artist Matthew Arthur Williams in-conversation with the curators; and ​‘Episode 3: Precarious Memory’ curated by Kelly Rappleye with Sarah Smith, at Civic House where we were joined by artists Morgan Quaintance and Anne-Marie Copestake.

Ryberg’s response frames Moving Images Within Precarious Structures through her own research and filmmaking practice. Namely through her documentary ​‘An Army of Lovers’ (‘En armé av älskande’, 2018) and one of Sweden’s first commercially run queer nightclubs City Club, to consider how different modes of moving image and multiple layers of precarity demonstrate and resist the erasure and loss of intersecting cultural-political struggles.

Ingrid Ryberg is Associate Professor in Film Studies in the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. She is the author of the book ​‘Swedish Film Feminism: Between Grassroots Movements and Welfare Policies’ (2026) and the co-editor of the volume ​‘The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-Racist Media Cultures’ (2018). Ryberg is also the director of films and performances, including the documentary ​‘En armé av älskande’ (‘An Army of Lovers’, 2018), and the interactive performance installation ​‘Inviter: Cinemaoke i den bergmanska garderoben’ (‘Invites: Cinemaoke in Bergman’s Closet’, 2018).

A response to the programme Moving Images Within Precarious Structures

Ingrid Ryberg, 2026

In 1985, a group of former organisers of one of the first commercially run queer nightclubs in Sweden – City Club – gathered to compile a video cassette celebrating the club’s launch twenty years earlier, in 1965. The amateur ​“jubilee film”, combining archival footage from the elaborate drag shows performed at the club with the gathered team’s recollections and anecdotes, was distributed on VHS tapes to former members as a commemoration of City Club’s brief but eventful history. By the time the club stopped in 1970, the ​“City Club Ballet” had put on nineteen professionally choreographed shows, including their own camp version of ​‘The Swan Lake’, which the team proudly talk about on the tape. Assembling and carefully syncing up super‑8 footage and audiotapes from eleven of the shows, scattered among former members of the club, the video testifies to a time-consuming volunteer labor of love and community effort to preserve an obscure history for cultural memory.

My documentary, ​‘An Army of Lovers’ (‘En armé av älskande’, 2018), about queer filmmaking in Sweden in the 1970s, includes a few clips from the City Club film, presented as magical glimpses into what José Esteban Muñoz (2009) discusses in terms of queer cultural production’s world-making insistence on the possibility for another world. However, by the time I got hold of the cassette, some thirty years after it was made, the images bore the mark not only of the limited super‑8 resolution in the first place but also of the migration to VHS’s low image quality and infamous short lifespan. The documentation of the shows as well as the recorded scenes with the gathered team were all discoloured and fading – seemingly counteracting the entire project’s goal to preserve the memory of the club for the future.

Emblematic of how multiple forms of precarity tend to inform and duplicate over time in marginalised moving image histories, the case of the City Club tape and my experience as a film scholar and filmmaker working with sidelined media histories and archives provide a lens for this response to the programme Moving Images Within Precarious Structures.

‘An Army of Lovers’ is centered around three rare queer films made in Sweden in the late 1970s, amid the gay liberation movement: ​‘Eva and Maria’ (‘Eva och Maria’, Marie Falksten et al., 1983), ​‘Damned Queers’ (‘Bögjävlar’, Gunnar Almér et al., 1977), and ​‘The Woman in Your Life is You’ (‘Kvinnan i ditt liv är du’, made collectively by members of the organisation Lesbian Front, 1977). Taking fierce issue with homophobic prejudice, stigmatisation, and media, the three films were all motivated by an urge to reclaim the image of homosexuality and offer affirmative self-presentations through educational fiction, documentary sincerity, and campy irony (Ryberg 2015).

An underlying critique of dominant narratives and media’s discreditation of minoritised groups similarly informs several of the films in Moving Images Within Precarious Structures – most evidently the satirical ​‘Tory Stories – An Ugly Streak of Violence’ (Peter Savage, 1984), turning sound and footage of Thatcher’s demonisation of the working class against herself. Overall, however – reflecting the programme’s span across an era of fading ideological conviction – what characterises the politics and aesthetics of the included works is less an investment in offering correctives in the form of ​“positive images”. Distinguished by a more tentative mode, they rather exert a dedication to finding alternative audiovisual languages to redescribe reality from nonhegemonic perspectives and express complex experiences of precarity related to issues of migration, class, and sexuality.

‘A Prayer Before Birth’ (Jacqui Duckworth, 1991) and ​‘Loss of Heat’ (Noski Deville, 1994), for instance, both offer intersectional challenges to the harsh homophobic climate of the 1990s and preconceived representations of lesbianism, race, and disability. However, they do so not so much from the perspective of identity politics but from layered positionalities, using experimental styles to come to terms with lived experiences of illness at odds with normative non-disabled renderings of the world. Conveying subjective and alternative understandings of time, space, difference, and relationality, both films evoke Gayatri Gopinath’s (2003, 2018) important work on queer diasporic aesthetic practices and representations of queer racialised bodies as archives of colonialism and racism. Addressing issues of desire, trust, and dependence through intimate images of lesbian relationships, both films are, moreover, indicative of how the programme as a whole, while framed by the notion of precarity, tangibly engages and pulls issues of care into focus.

Many of the individual films, but also their curation, evoke the etymological connection between caretaking and curation that Gopinath highlights in reflecting over how the act of placing different aesthetic practices in relation to one another obliges an engagement with the past and a caring about and valuing of that deemed without value. By bringing into relation a diverse range of artists’ moving images responding to precarity from multiple perspectives, inviting a variety of ways of seeing and knowing the world, the programme enacts and enables careful attendance to multiple forms of difference and historical experience.

Curation as caregiving is evident not least in the organisation Cinenova’s restoration of ​‘A Prayer Before Birth’ and ​‘Loss of Heat’ and other films existing in precarious conditions that ​“address oppositional histories and questions of difference”. Evoking the concept of feminist ethics of care in archival practices (Caswell and Cifor, 2016), Cinenova’s digitised collection The Work We Share is described as intended ​“to acknowledge Cinenova’s interdependency: from organisation to filmmakers, cultural workers, communities, and individuals. How can we acknowledge our interdependent relationships?”.

While nowadays, thankfully, usually conducted in more professionalised ways and with greater technological awareness than in the case of the City Club jubilee film, community projects and archives dedicated to collecting and restoring neglected moving image histories, like Cinenova and many others, nevertheless remain under precarious conditions. Non-profit and volunteer-based activist initiatives are often exhausted by constant struggles with lack of funds, technical resources, storage capacity, and sustainable structures for the crucial care work they conduct.

Present throughout the programme, notions of care ethics and caring for the past are evoked, for instance, in Vivienne Dick’s exploration of themes of difference, relatedness, and interconnection in ​‘The Irreducible Difference of the Other’ (2013) and in the tender approach to migrant, diasporic, and working class subjects’ varying memories and experiences in ​‘Tower XYZ’ (Ayo Akingbade, 2016), ​‘The Expulsion’ (Larry Achiampong, 2019), and ​‘Soon Come’ (Matthew Arthur Williams, 2022). Offering critical reflections on gentrification, social cleansing, and labor exploitation, they carve out aesthetic space for alternative voices and viewpoints in finetuned ways that premier the self-reflexive, fragmentary, and open-endedness over objectivity, coherence, and closure. Their sensitive and poetic use of interviews and subjective voice-over stand in contrast to conventional documentary narrative techniques.

Many of the films can be understood as forming part of the legacy of what Laura U. Marks terms intercultural cinema, a movement that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s ​“characterised by experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge, or living as a minority in the still majority white, Euro-American West” (Marks 2000, 1). Like examples discussed by Marks, films such as ​‘Soon Come’ – which quotes Walter Benjamin’s thinking on history – and Morgan Quaintance’s ​‘Another Decade’ – which includes statements by several cultural thinkers – are influenced by critical theory and an ​“intellectual climate characterised by the disintegration of master narratives and a growing conceptualisation of knowledge as partial and contested” (2).

The films in the programme share with Marks’ categorisation of intercultural cinema a felt sense of distrust in the ability of visuality, language, and available historical records to represent cultural memory. Similarly to how filmmakers of intercultural cinema excavate and interrogate historical archives ​“in order to read their own histories in its gaps, or to force a gap in the archive so that they have a space in which to speak” (5), the explorations of precarious memory in the third episode of Moving Images Within Precarious Structures – Precarious Memory, curated by Kelly Rappleye with Sarah Smith – encourage alternative ways of understanding and asking questions of the past.

Offering a thoughtful deconstruction of Iranian cinema’s representational regimes and regulation of depictions of love and desire, ​‘Nazarbazi نظربازی’ (Maryam Takafory, 2022), for instance, invites attendance not only to the intimate interactions between women and men that are allowed to be seen, but also to what remains invisible, prohibited, and unrepresentable. Also based on existing footage from different periods, ​‘UNDR’ (Kamal Aljafari, 2024) uses aerial images of Palestinian landscapes eroding by detonations to reflect on an ongoing violent reality of occupation, surveillance, and visual mastery. Testifying to the recent turn to critical fabulation and speculative historiography (Hartman 2008; 2019) to address archival violence and absence, ​‘Two Refusals’ (Suneil Sanzgiri, 2024) unearths lost histories and fragments of remembrance of intertwined struggles against colonialism in India and Africa by experimenting with digital as well as analogue moving image technologies.

In their combinations of a variety of media formats and archival images to confront erasures, silences, and the limits of visuality, these and many of the other films in the programme evoke memories and subjective experiences through an appeal to embodied knowledges and the senses beyond vision. Activating what Marks discusses in terms of haptic visuality, ​‘A Prayer Before Birth’, ​‘The Expulsion’, and ​‘Two Refusals’ might all be said to invite a tactile and interactive relationship to the images that call forth ethical respect for otherness. In this sense, the programme’s centering of the issue of care extends also to the viewer.

Marks’ elaboration of haptic visuality in contrast to the mastery associated with optical visuality aptly speaks to the precarity of the worn and disintegrating VHS tape of City Club’s drag shows – conditions under which many marginalized moving image histories and archival materials still exist. Video’s diminished visual quality and rapid decay add to its haptic qualities, according to Marks. Writing about deteriorating tapes of experimental videos made by artists in the 1990s that deal with the experience of bodily change due to AIDS, she brings together processes of loss of coherence of the diseased human body and the vanishing visibility of aging videotapes (Marks 2002). The images’ indistinctness, Marks argues, invites a haptic look that does not rely on a separation between looker and object but builds an emotional connection with the medium itself, enabling compassion and engagement also with people and death.

In the conversations between former members included in the City Club jubilee film, there is no mention of the AIDS epidemic, despite its, at that time, rapid expansion and devastating consequences for queer communities. Delving into a lost era before the liberation movement as well as HIV, the participants talk lovingly about the choreography and design of the shows, the audience, and how the club operated. Watching the demagnetising tape decades after its recording, the images slow erasure amplifies the silence about the virus and death. Brought into relief by the disappearing and distorted images, this tangible absence invites the viewer to make sense of this history through other registers. The videotape’s dying images of aging men who ignore their historical moment and lose themselves in ephemeral details about the shows evoke Muñoz’s notion of queer utopian memory as a critique of the present and its limits. Despite the multiple layers of precarity that surround these moving image remembrances, they still cast pictures of futurity and possibility.

Bibliography

Caswell, M. & M. Cifor. 2016. ​“From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives”, Archivaria, 81: 23 – 43.

Gopinath, G. 2005. ​‘Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures’ (Duke University Press).

Gopinath, G. 2018. ​‘Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora’ (Duke University Press).

Hartman, S. 2008. ​“Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2): 1 – 14.

Hartman, S. 2019. ​‘Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval’ (W. W. Norton & Company).

Marks, L. U. 2000. ​‘The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses’ (Duke University Press).

Marks, L. U. 2002. ​‘Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media’ (University of Minnesota Press).

Muñoz, J. E. 2009. ​‘Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity’ (NYU Press).

Ryberg, I. 2015. ​“Between Positive Representation and Camp Performance: Three Films From the Swedish Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement”, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 5 (2): 137 – 154.

Image descriptions:

1. Footage from a degraded colour VHS tape shows a medium close up of a drag queen smiling on stage. She wears long dark brown hair, a blue top and dark eye makeup.

2. Footage from a degraded colour VHS tape shows a drag queen dancing on stage. She wears yellow blonde hair, a white tiara and tutu dress against an embroidered blue curtain behind her.