Solidarity through mail-based participatory visual research: exploring queer and feminist futures through an art, activism and archiving project with 2SLGBTQ+ youth amidst COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a logistical problem to our normal ways of engaging in participatory visual research. Our in-person art, activism and archiving with 2SLGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian youth pivoted to use distanced engagement strategies that met the demands of the pandemic. We sought to create networks of solidarity while we were apart. Monthly, over the course of a year, we mailed out themed packages of art supplies and directions to fifty-five 2SLGBTQ+ youth situated in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. Participants then created the artworks, photographed them and contextualised them through text. While the resulting co-curated digital archive includes multiple mediums, here we focus on the participants’ zines and dioramas for what they taught us about 2SLGBTQ+ youth’s identities, activism, beliefs, friends, home, family, fears, strengths and futures. The digital archive of our artwork deconstructs, explores and affirms identities and functions to build solidarity during a time of increased isolation. We argue that collaboratively building the digital archive was a feminist act of reclamation and a declaration of youth queer activism.