Image courtesy of Queer City Cinema

Audibly-Out! is play, provocation, and pure pleasure. It’s about queering the ear, tempting bodies to dance, and transcending firmly entrenched power relations that continue to present themselves in straight/ queer/ audio worlds.

When approached to curate Audibly-Out!, I instinctually invited artists whose works, sounds, technologies, performance styles, and politics represent different layers of what it means to live, breathe, and play in straight worlds that need to be queered, and queer worlds that need to be more self-reflexive and critical.

In response to the title of the series Audibly-Out!, I turned to academic and activist Eve Sedgwick’s seminal text Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and her claim, “The gay closet is not a feature only of the lives of gay people. But for many gay people it is still the fundamental feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the support of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence” (68). Audibly-Out! presents four performances of techie queer ladies breaking out of closets. Their artworks shed light on the challenges faced by those who queer boundaries in real life, the complexities of what it means to live queerly, and the coming undone that occurs each time we endure coming out of yet another closet.

Audibly-Out! is a new collaborative venture presented by Queer City Cinema and holophon.ca. As a lover of audio and digital sounds, DJ cultures, dancefloors, and techie queers, I am delighted to be its first curator!

- Charity Marsh, Series Curator