An Interview with Julian Konuk: On trans temporality, stitching film & queering the archive

We interviewed transdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Julian Konuk about his creative practise, his mission to queer the archive, and his experimental short film Homme-Sick. The film stitches together found archive footage and footage from Julian's own family archives, expanding the very possibilities of archiving, both public and private. It challenges and remakes time to create a new kind of trans temporality. It offers a new way to look into memory and history, and with it, a new way to look forwards, to imagine our future.

You are a transdisciplinary artist and writer. Can you tell us about your creative practice and how you go about approaching film as a medium?

Both my writing and artistic practices go hand in hand, almost causally. They speak to and from each other in ways I often don’t formally realise until a project or piece is “completed.” I guess in this sense, my approach is very fluid, experimental, and ultimately stemming from a deeply diaristic perspective. As my films serve as containers or vessels to rethink and reimagine notions of the transcorporeal body and how these bodies react in different spaces, I am constantly trying to expand the possibilities of film as a medium. I’m not interested in utilising traditional editing techniques or adhering to a specific “genre” or subjectivity. As film is time-based, it’s fundamentally restricted linearly, which forces me to confront the inherent failure I face in depicting queer and trans temporalities. While this can be incredibly frustrating, I have come to love the intrinsic messiness of working with film.

Homme-Sick is an experimental film which weaves together archival footage (found and from your family archive). What was the process like of finding this footage and understanding how to weave it together?

I never know what I am trying to create until it is in the process of being created. Thus, the

process of finding archival footage to play around with can often be very daunting and seemingly endless. But it’s this “endlessness” that intrigues me most. I find myself combing through incredibly extensive online archives, randomly searching for things that catch my eye. This could be anything from a random collection of strange adverts from the 80s, an outdated documentary film on puberty from the 50s, or any number of pornographic films featuring men sprawled across a hay-strewn barn in the dead of winter. From there I begin to find interconnections, whether that be visually, auditorily, or thematically, and begin to stitch everything together piece by piece, and then unstitch it, and then restitch it, and repeat.

The film questions the relationship between home and family, and transness. Can you tell us

about investigating that relationship through the film?

I have been conducting extensive research into the relationships between home, family, and

transness for quite a while now, and I found that one of the main common threads is the archive.

Epistemologically speaking, archive comes from arkheion, meaning house. Historically and

traditionally speaking, the archive can be seen as upholding these virtues of the house, and thus of property, ownership, power, categorisation, and of the linearity of time and space. This tradition of the archive as house connotes to ideals of domestic space, of the home, and therefore of the family. The archive becomes a sort of genealogy of time and space in which reproduction is used as a heteronormative utopian world-making for the only possible future; our present. In Homme-Sick, I attempt to interrogate these traditional notions of home and family through a trans poetic lens. This is not to say that queer and trans bodies live outside the reach and effect of dominant, hegemonic structures of capitalism, rather, it is to say that queer bodies inherently challenge this system of corrupt values and marketable relations by having created, throughout histories and presents and futures, divergent strategies and practices of communication, thinking, and intimacies.

Homme-Sick plays with time itself, deconstructs it and reformulates it. How do you think time intersects with queer and transness?

A central theme to my artistic practice is reimaging speculative futurities. In order to enact this, however, it is necessary to view history in a non-linear sense; the past is not trapped in the past, nor is the present. Trans bodies are constantly in a state of change and fluidity, never once the same at a given point in time. Trans and queer bodies inhabit a timelessness and concurrently a space full of time - all at once the past, the present, and the future; through a process of grieving and mourning for what could have been; this time that never came to full fruition in youth or even adulthood becomes a ghostly figure or memory. How many times can one person grow up and cross the supposed threshold from immaturity to maturity? Where does this line exist and how can this transgression emancipate itself from these heterosexual and cisgendered, binaristic hegemonies of historicity, time and space?

You talk about expanding the possibilities of archiving trans bodies through this film. Could you tell us more about that, and the importance of archiving trans experience and queering the archive?

My entire artistic practice essentially centres this idea of queering the archive - not necessarily creating queer archives, but attempting to queer the archive in and of itself. The archive is inherently linked and embedded within alleged Western historicities of colonialist ideals. And if the archive is how we view or make sense of what is deemed history, then what is deemed history? Typically, history manifests itself in the concrete and visible form of what is written down, what is recorded, or what is seen. What do we remember? What do we forget, or rather what do we choose to forget and what is chosen for us to forget? Queering the archive does not only imply creating new archives full of lost and negated queer histories, it also implies a complete upheaval of how we view, interpret, and attempt to make sense of the past. Ultimately, queering the archive means disintegrating these binaries of communication, thinking, and intimacies that the traditional archive inherently upholds and perpetuates in the name of familial and capitalist accumulation. Furthermore, the trans body as archive, in constituency with this idea of queering the archive, does not point to a narrowing and homogenising of narratives, nor to a sort of compacting or compression of transness, but rather a complete rejection of current histories and archival strategies. Trans bodies as archive translates to a newly constructed way of narrating forgotten histories and ways of life incongruent to reproductive capitalist socialites, in order to imagine new methodologies for worldbuilding.

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Julian Konuk is a transdisciplinary artist and writer based in London. His work has been shown internationally throughout the UK, France, North America, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Recent notable exhibitions and screenings include Somerset House (2023), the Barbican (2022), Ugly Duck (2024), Pushkin House (2024), Les Rencontres d'Arles (2023), and Fringe! Queer Film Fest (2020-2023). Selected writing pieces were recently published in T’ART Press, in Mourning, with Sticky Fingers Publishing, Carrion Press, as well as the limited edition art book, “With No Orbit.” He holds a masters degree in photography from the Royal College of Art, where he was the recipient of the New Photography Prize 2023, judged by Hana Noorali with the support of Simon Bishop. He is the founder and editor of “Sexy Trans Masc Calendar,” a limited edition calendar successfully sold out in several countries. He also has multiple short films included in Otherness Archive. Upcoming, some of Julian Konuk’s work will be published with Der Grief as well as shown with Scottish Queer International Film Festival and MT Queer in Brazil.