Collin Klugbauer has been working at the Schwules Museum for almost a decade and has played a key role in shaping exhibition management at the SMU. Collin recently co-curated the exhibition “Burning Down the Patriarchy” which not only features photographs by Petra Gall, but also addresses the important question of how queer curation can open up spaces for FLINTA* communities. In this conversation, Klugbauer explains why museums need to become more queer, open, and accessible, how Petra Gall’s photographs document feminist movements of the 1980s and 90s, and what today’s FLINTA* communities can learn from them.

Yasmin: Collin, our first interview! How long have you been at the Schwules Museum and how do you spend your time here?

Collin: I’ve been at the Schwules Museum for nine years now and have held various positions. I’m currently head of exhibition management and curator of the exhibition “Feuer + Flamme dem Patriarchat” (Burning Down the Patriarchy), which has been on display here since July. I started as an intern at the SMU in 2017, which lasted two years. I used to work more with the art collection, in the archives, and in education.

And are you satisfied with your work?

Most of the time, yes! (laughs) I enjoy working at a queer institution with an activist history that carries the knowledge of so many generations. I really like the diversity of my work: I work with great curators and activists and get to deal with a wide variety of topics. As a curator, I can delve into the depths of the Schwules Museum’s collection and always find objects that I find totally inspiring. I have a job where I can be creative, but also get involved with the structure of the museum. I work a lot on the question of how to enable different queer groups to contribute their topics to exhibition projects at the Schwules Museum, how we can continue to implement measures to break down barriers and make exhibitions accessible, despite cutbacks and less money. I think about this a lot together with Panda from the education department.

I read online that you studied political science, sociology, and political theory. How did you end up in curation?

During my studies, I dealt with topics such as social inequality and justice, discrimination and emancipation, Marxist and feminist debates, but also queer theory. I was also active as a feminist during my studies—at that time, among other things, in the AFLR*, the Women’s and Lesbian Department, and in a working group that campaigned for gender-neutral toilets on the university campus, but also at the student magazine “diskus” in Frankfurt. I was always interested in structures that stood for something – these spaces are places of political self-understanding, but also an attempt to change society. Or at least places where you experience less sexism and queer hostility for a short time. It’s not that far from curating and working in a museum. The Schwules Museum is also a place that stands for something socio-politically, that wants to be a queer platform. Unlike the university, it could be a place that is not so academic, but more open and accessible.

At the Schwules Museum, we are also concerned with initiating queer and socio-political debates, preserving and showcasing queer history, and creating a counter-archive to heteronormative art and cultural history. The Schwules Museum is even more than that—it’s a queer community space where activists, artists, and curators negotiate topics from their perspective in exhibitions or collection projects and strengthen their queer discourses. I think it’s very special that the museum tries to be permeable in this way. So those are the reasons why I’m here at the museum. Well, and ultimately also because I like going to exhibitions! But I can’t do it as carefree as I used to.

Do you have a lot to complain about during your visits?

Yes! (both laugh) I also visit great exhibitions that inspire me, but I often find myself annoyed. It starts with complicated texts and small font sizes. Exhibitions in German museums are often still very elitist places that appeal to a specific, middle-class audience. But I’m also annoyed by how heteronormative and intersectionally uncurated they are. Queerness is often only discussed in museums during Pride Week, and queer stories are told separately. Or queer themes only ever appear in certain narratives, for example, gay men are mentioned in the context of HIV/AIDS, or lesbians are mentioned in the context of same-sex marriage. And this is despite the fact that exhibitions often already feature objects that could be used to tell the history of gender or sexuality. A queer perspective in exhibitions can also mean highlighting heterosexuality, endo- and cis-gender identity, or naming exclusions. And thus making the power of the tacit norm as such recognizable… This makes me all the more delighted when I see exhibitions that actually open up queer perspectives. There are also some really great people in museums who are working to queer museums and curate and collect in a more discrimination-sensitive way. I am also part of the organizing team of the open network “Museen Queeren” (Queering Museums), where there is an exchange about exactly this, and people present queer interventions and projects and talk about queer counterstrategies.

Curating has become such a buzzword: we curate our wardrobe, a dinner party, or our own social media feed… Do you have any idea why?

As far as I’m concerned, everyone can curate their dinner party and their social media feed; I’m happy to share the term. I can also tell a story with a dinner party, build suspense, set a tone, convey a feeling—maybe the term fits quite well there, too. I think that in the museum context, the meaning of the term curating is also shifting increasingly. We no longer want to tell a story of domination in the museum; we don’t want to educate or lecture anyone either. I want to see exhibitions curated in the Schwules Museum that create a space for reflection, for self-representation, for self-assurance and empowerment. I believe the strength of the Schwules Museum is that it wants to allow for many perspectives and offers different groups the opportunity to set their own approaches and themes and to design projects themselves, i.e., to have decision-making power in this regard. We apply for many exhibition projects with the respective groups, so an exhibition on sex work is also curated by sex workers. And this positionality and the enormous knowledge that people bring here is also noticeable in the exhibitions. I believe that the Schwules Museum often manages to open up spaces that mean something to people. This can be encouraging, especially in these tough political times and with increased queerphobic hostility.

You recently curated the exhibition “Feuer + Flamme dem Patriarchat” (Burning Down the Patriarchy) with photographs by Petra Gall. How did you go about curating it?

I’ve been familiar with Petra Gall for quite some time: when I started here in 2017, the exhibition “Tapetenwechsel” (Change of Scenery) by Wolfgang Theis, a founding member of the Schwules Museum, was on display. There was a large photograph by Petra Gall of Walpurgis Night in 1983, showing demonstrators running energetically toward the camera. It’s one of her iconic images, which has also been reproduced in many feminist media outlets. So I was welcomed to the Schwules Museum by Petra, so to speak—before I even knew who Petra Gall was. At some point, I became more familiar with her work because we repeatedly showed her photographs and most recently there were two great digitization projects related to her work. But it was really impressive and also surprising to delve so deeply into her collection again for the curation of the exhibition.

Gall’s estate comprises around 200,000 images. How do you make the right selection from such a large quantity?

Well, first of all, I didn’t do it alone, I had help from Birga Meyer! There is a lot to discover in the estate, fashion photography, concert photos, portraits, but also, for example, an immense collection of travel photographs that are really great and still largely unedited. Petra traveled a lot to the former Soviet Union and later to Russia, for example. There are also photos from the first CSD in St. Petersburg in 1992, which she documented. For “Feuer + Flamme”, we focused on only a small part of her collection, namely the photographs of the women’s and lesbian movement in Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s. In the exhibition, we follow Petra Gall’s footsteps through feminist Berlin and place them in a political context. In the first chapter, we talk about the structural conditions of feminist projects at the time and show how housing policy and vacant properties led to squatting and how spaces for political activism and living were taken during this period. Projects such as the Schokofabrik, which also arose from squatting, still exist today. In the second chapter, we look at what women and lesbians took to the streets and demonstrated for. Many of the issues are still relevant today—wage equality, the fight against §218, which criminalizes abortion, sexualized violence, and racism. These issues were always part of the major debates of the time and are closely linked to the anti-war movement and ecological issues. Finally, we look at women’s lesbian spaces, or what today would be called FLINTA* spaces; activism from within, so to speak. We show the sex-positive spaces that feminists created for themselves, how they celebrated, flirted, and danced at parties, how incredibly productive artists were during this period, and how they established new forms and ways of working. And at the end, there is a projection of Petra Gall’s concert recordings—she photographed greats such as David Bowie and Tina Turner, but also took fantastic photos of feminist scene bands such as “Außerhalb.” Of course, the photos do not show the full extent of this movement’s activism—we were unable to find certain aspects in the photos, e.g., the East Berlin women’s movement is not depicted.

So the photos reflect social exclusions; how did you deal with this curatorially?

We classified this in the inventory, but also traced the conflicts and exclusions within the feminist scenes. Although there are almost no East Berlin women’s and lesbian contexts to be found on a visual level, we highlight this perspective in the text. For example, the text on §218 mentions that things got worse for women in the GDR who had unwanted pregnancies after reunification. Abortions were once legal in the GDR and were then criminalized again after reunification. This is interesting because it goes against the West German narrative of progress. Elsewhere, we discuss how racism and nationalism became increasingly important issues for the women’s and lesbian movement in the 1990s, but the scene depicted is still very white. There are few documents of queer BIPoC activism in the photo archive, even though the ADEFRA group already existed in the 1980s and Audre Lorde lectured at the FU. We also use the term women’s lesbian movement as a historical term in the exhibition, but later refer to FLINTA* because feminist contexts have changed and parts of them are now trans* and inter* inclusive.

But FLINTA* is not an uncomplicated term either…

We use the term FLINTA*, which stands for women, lesbians, inter*, non-binary, trans*, and agender. I believe that this term and the concepts associated with it are still necessary today and play an important role. There have been and still are events, parties, and sex-positive spaces, such as BDSM parties or demonstration blocks, that take place in a more protected setting. We still live in a patriarchal society where assault, violence, and degradation by cis men are commonplace. FLINTA* spaces serve as a brief escape from these impositions and allow us to relate to each other differently. Spaces for empowerment also need a framework in which certain groups can be themselves and do not have to grapple with certain power structures. That does not mean that these spaces always function well or that there is no conflict, but I understand why this is still necessary in this society.

Me too! What role do the artistic works of Lena Rosa Händle, Katharina Voß, and Janin Afken play in the continuity of feminist discourses of the last century in the present?

The sculpture “Pelze” is directly related to the original Pelze lettering. Pelze was a feminist, avant-garde, sex-positive space in Schöneberg, located in a former fur shop. For her artistic work, Lena Rosa Händle has essentially traced the Pelze lettering and translated it into neon lettering that hangs from chains on the ceiling. The work references Pelze as a historical place! It deals with feminist memory and raises questions about why this knowledge is so often lost and how this queer and feminist knowledge and experience could be preserved and continued. It also references other fur works, such as Meret Oppenheim’s fur cup. I think this is a wonderful way to connect today’s feminist generation with the activism of an older generation. The video work “Subjekträume” (Subject Spaces) by Katharina Voß and Janin Afken portrays three activists from Pelze. I find the work important because there is so little representation of lesbian activism from that period. It’s really exciting to see the archive material on display and hear what the interviewees have to say about this period and this particular place.

What kind of inspiration can the exhibition give to today’s FLINTA* community, or queer self-organizations in general? Is there anything you would like visitors to take away from the exhibition?

I hope that the exhibition shows how fierce these activists were back then and what they achieved. There is often the impression that we have “achieved nothing,” but the feminist and queer movement has done quite a lot! Even though I still live in a world full of impositions, it’s worth fighting for. I live in a completely different world than women, lesbians, and queers did in the 1980s; that means I can shape my life in a completely different way. I think it’s important to recognize that. And activists from back then are also part of today’s FLINTA* communities. I also hope that the exhibition will bring even more knowledge about this period to the Schwules Museum. Some people have already recognized themselves in the photos, which was great. And it helps us to continue processing this collection and thus better represent a piece of queer and feminist history.

Thank you, Collin, for your insights.

Interview and photo: Yasmin Künze