Video-essay: Queer Paper Gardens, 2013
Queer Paper Gardens is a video essay done by Maria Lusitano and paula roush. This video was the product of our three year research onto the study of collage, gender and sexuality and the display of the unconscious.
The main subject of our work were two collage books: Valentine Penrose's book Dons des Féminines (1951) and Max Ernst’s roman collage Une Semaine de Bonté (1934). Both works, done by these two famous surrealists during the first decades of the XXth century, explored the display of the unconscious by working with poetry and collage.
The process of making this film was quite interesting. In a first phase we investigated critical theory and the history of collage, and worked with collage,. In a second phase, we spent one week in Maria Lusitano's childhood house in Lisbon, where we developed a film project in collaboration with artist Eunice Gonçalves Duarte, working the script through improvisation.
The video-essay Queer Paper Gardens, is the final result of a process that combines narratives resulting from the historical archive, with a cryptic personal narrative. The narrative therefore, combines and relates images and stories from the past, with allusions to contemporary personal events.