Porn Film Archive Workshop

Workshop, 240 min.

By: Nils Meyn & Peter Rehberg & Simon Schultz

Please note: this event is in English only.

Maximum participants: 12 (all genders are welcome)

Fee: 10 EUR, 3 EUR reduced rate

Registration (required until 18.10.2021): fuehrungen@schwulesmuseum.de

Location: Schwules Museum, Lützowstraße 73, 10785 Berlin (wheel-chair accessible, please read the notes on the website of Schwules Museum)

COVID: The event will be following the up-to-date regulations. Participants should get a  COVID test before the event when not fully vaccinated.

Concept

The Schwules Museum makes its porn film collection accessible, the largest of its kind in any German institution. We invite all porn lovers to watch and discuss old gay porn flicks on VHS and Super 8 at the archive.

The porn film collection houses roughly 3.000 items and shows the variety of gay pornography from the 1970s to the early 2000s, ranging from mainstream to kinky underground productions, and from commercial tapes to private video bootlegs. Over the past decades the films came into the archive as donations by private collectors who have left personal notes and marks with them. So far, only one quarter of the collection has been catalogued. Also, only a few lesbian and trans* porn films have been indexed.

Participants will be watching and discovering porn in groups, and together we will be examining the films’ importance as historical, archival and erotic objects. Participants will get to know the collection, its place within the larger queer archive as well as the materials’ endangered physical status. We especially invite porn and sex workers, filmmakers, artists, curators and researchers to the workshop as we are also open to starting future projects with them. Yet all participants may bring their own interests and desires to the table.

Our goal is to make the collection known and highlight pornography’s preservation-worthy histories. The workshop results might indicate in which directions further work on the collection can go, including digitization and public screenings.

Schedule

13:00-13:45

• round of introductions
• input by workshop facilitators on the Schwules Museum, its archival practice and the relevance of pornography within the museum’s collections; explanation of the participants’ tasks
• introduction to the porn film collection in the archive, participants are free to browse it and may select films they are interested in

13:45-16:15 (incl. self-organized break time)

• independent viewings of VHS tapes or Super 8 reels in small groups
• 6 viewing stations (5x VHS, 1x Super 8) will be set up in the museum’s rooms.
• Participants choose between materials pre-selected by the workshop facilitators, or they watch porn they’ve found in the archive themselves.
• Participants take the role of archivists: they are tasked to register the materials’ essential properties on prepared forms. Moreover, they make notes about their viewing experiences.
• The workshop facilitators help with technical issues as well as engage in open conversations about the materials.
• Optional: Participants take part in a guided tour through the whole Schwules Museum archive.

16:15-17:00

• Everyone shares their discoveries with the full group.
• Together we have a discussion following these questions: Why is it important to archive porn? How has porn changed historically? What does it mean to collect porn and what work can be done with it (conversational, curatorial…)?
• Feedback round

Please note our pandemic rules and ticket information