I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET

Videonale 20, with support of Fluentum commissioned the Bonn, Germany edition of I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET. Ads were run in local papers for lesbian, queer or non binary women interested in participating in video portraits for Videonale 20. We (Dani and Sheilah) met with the seven women from Bonn who were interested in being part of the project in November 2024. We recorded participants at locations of their choosing, and with objects that were important in some way to them. All of these parts were compiled into a 7 minute piece titled Open Conch which showed at Flow artspace for the duration of Videonale. In this piece a main character with pink hair follows the conch to find what is actually natural; circles of women dreaming, the slaying of the patriarchy by a red wooden sword and the calling in of queer love through movement, fabric, sound and circle.

The artists and the Videonale thank all the participating women for their courage and generosity.

You can find more information on the Videonale website.

What do we see when we move through the public sphere? And what don’t we see? An invitation to a self-experiment. I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET is a quote from a participant of the first edition of this project, which took place in Düsseldorf in 2024 in the context of Circulating Copies of the Stiftung IMAI (Inter Media Art Institute). She described her lived situation as an older lesbian woman. Dani and Sheilah ReStack take the invisibility conveyed in this quote as the starting point of their project for the urban space of Bonn. Video portraits appear at unexpected places, interrupt the advertising, present themselves in shop windows. They are portraits of lesbian and queer women, recorded in settings and with objects they have chosen themselves. Surprising, temporary and yet with clear presence, they interrupt prevailing pictorial worlds and occupy the places in public that are generally not accessible to older bodies read as female in general and to older, queer bodies read as female in particular.

The aim is to produce visibility, but it is also about an expression of recognition for those who came before them in their struggle for equality and participation and who are still to come – in the spirit of a self-created genealogy of queer sisterhood. It is also about making noticeable and conceivable a connection between these and other women with their respectively specific, often closeted, and at the same time supraindividual life experiences, linked with the wish for solidarity and community in resistance against and beyond normatively drawn boundaries.

While the individual portraits of the Bonn women can be seen in the urban space, these will be brought together in the video version shown in the flow atelier. An expanded reading will be made possible here with the means of montage and fiction, which invites viewers to imagine a community of the many across generations. (Tasja Langenbach)