It has been more than one year since I returned from my research stay in Berlin. It is strange with artmaking, – it doesn’t necessarily happen when you want it to. I had planned to start making art from my findings at the Hirschfeld library as soon as I got home. But it didn’t turn out that way. I need time to think, and to let the material and my experiences sink. In the beginning I was rather overwhelmed with the range of material I had collected. It was so much! And it wasn’t at all what I had thought I would find. The Magnus Hirschfeld library was much more scientific than I had thought, and where I had thought to find photos, I found shelves upon shelves of textbooks, scientific and medical treatises, novels, encyclopaedias, and whatnot. It is a very good and interesting collection, of course, but more complex than I in my naivety had imagined. So the material wasn’t as I had thought, and I couldn’t make the art I had thought. All this is good – in such a project one has to meet the material as it is, and let what happens happen. Even if it takes time. I am now getting a clearer vision of how to continue with the art-making itself.

After this year of maturing the impressions, what I most clearly feel personally as important and interesting pieces in what I found is first and foremost the persons involved. The queers themselves. Tentatively – or maybe wildly – exploring the possibilities to be themselves in Weimar Berlin. Fresh from the impressions of the First World War, raised in Kaiserzeit repression, but now perhaps facing freedom. Trying to live their newfound queer lives while observed by the police, by tourists visiting the queer locations for laughs and wonder (it was a tourist attraction at that time, with even some guidebooks mentioning the locations), observed by the scientists trying to understand their “condition” – with the aim to liberate – and some to repress. And ever closer, the shadow of the growing Nazism. And here they are, the queers of Weimar Berlin, staring back at me from the pages of the century-old books. For example, I found a series of portraits in a medical journal, where the subjects looked directly at the camera, with a mix of defiance and vulnerability. Some face the camera with bold, challenging looks. Some look shy, embarrassed. And some look just happy, as if they were in love.