ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the function of the archival fragment as both evidence of past activity and as persistent materiality in the present. Through a discussion of Trajal Harrell’s Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (2009–ongoing), the chapter argues that the performed gesture is a particular sort of archival fragment that can transcend causal historical narratives and, in so doing, can unfix subjects from their entrapment in purely evidentiary uses of archives. Building on Vilem Flusser and Giorgio Agamben’s theorisations of the gesture and José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of queer futurity through his discussion of the gestures of queer club performer Kevin Aviance, it is suggested that the gesture can be a paradigm for the queer potential of the archival fragment. Understood as gestural, it is argued that the archival fragment can be viewed as a piece of material that, because it belongs to the here and now and the then and there, is always enacting a movement that can allow for the simultaneous rethinking of the past-present-future.
