Der queere* Blick
"Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within it's epistemological sphere - while evaporating the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility." (José Esteban Muñoz, 2008)
In her bachelor's thesis "Der queere* Blick" in the summer semester 2024, Celina Marie Köhring, a graduate of the Communication Design course, uses illustration and experimental work with fabric to explore the affirmative visibility of queer* individuals:
"In the depiction of queer* life, individuals are often reduced to their queerness. Their other characteristics and traits are ignored and their person is made invisible in this sense. Through this renewed reduction to stereotypes, their social positions as outsiders are further consolidated. Unfortunately, this happens too often in the quest for "more visibility". Therefore, less attention should be paid to what is made visible and more to how it is made visible. I want to create an actual representation of queer* life and experience. A visibility that acknowledges their queerness without further stereotyping."
In her work, Celina Marie Köhring criticizes the status of the visual as a guarantor of knowledge. For her, the connection between a person's appearance and a classification and evaluation of the person based on this forms the basis for all forms of discrimination. The work explores how to work against this pattern through representation. It argues for a searching gaze instead of a knowing gaze and for reflecting on what influences our culture of seeing.
In her process, Celina Marie collected materials to characterize a fictional queer* person after researching theories of visibility and representation. These materials are drawings of objects of various queer* identifying people that she visited regularly over a period of 2 months. The drawings come together in an installative spatial object and form the characterization of a fake person. Through this approach, Celina Marie aims to blur the boundary between the real and the curated in order to remove trust in the visual.
The spatial object is a wooden frame consisting of three walls covered with fabric. The drawn objects are embroidered by hand on the fabric walls. The object is accompanied by Celina Marie's thesis, in which she explores the theme of visibility and her design decisions in greater depth.
The project was presented at the Folkwang Finale on September 28, 2024 at Campus Welterbe Zollverein in the SANAA building.