To celebrate Foyle Pride week RFR (Rewind<<Fastforward>>Record) have launched a stunning new exhibition at the Void Gallery in Derry paying tribute to the city’s fearless queer community.
As part of a three-week residency, the RFR team worked with the Rainbow Project, with the first workshop bringing younger and older members of the community together to explore the centre’s archive of scrapbooks documenting Foyle Pride and Derry’s LGBTQ+ activism since the early ’90s.
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The workshop created a fascinating intergenerational conversation with older members of the community sharing stories from the past and younger LGBTQ+ people expressing some of the challenges that they still face in spite of marriage equality.
Following a talk on the history of Irish LGBTQ+ activism by RFR programme manager Han Tiernan, the second workshop saw RFR co-founder Brendan Fox and visual artist Sarah Edmondson working with a group of younger LGBTQ+ people to develop a beautiful series of placards.
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As part of the public engagement programme, RFR commissioned a brand new queer walking tour delivered by Eimear Willis of the Rainbow Project. The tour was brought to life with members of the community sharing personal accounts of the histories in the places that they happened.
The brand new RFR exhibition launched last night forms a cumulative response to the workshops and tour with images from the scrapbooks being brought to life as three-dimensional cutouts, displayed to map the history of Foyle Pride.
Alongside two four-metre-high banners from the Foyle Pride archive, the placards created by the youth group generate a visual conversation between the past and the present, representing the ongoing struggles within the LGBTQ+ community.
The RFR exhibition at Void Gallery can be viewed daily between 11am and 5pm until this Saturday, August 27, 2022.
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