start

SOURCES:
Theory text - Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin - a safe space for queer’s to be true self:
- "[…] the queer archive is fragile from fear and forgetting too often written in whispers and saved in scraps."
- "Gay identity is a paradox of freedom and containment."
- "Homosexuals must continue to remember that while there may be nothing bad in being a homosexual, there is certainly nothing good."
- "The act specified the right of two men - never three or more - to be intimate within totally private spaces. This actually reinforced the culpability of men caught publicly, whether in flagrante delicto or in the process of seduction."
- "Each time I step into a gay bar, I sense my identity being calibrated - a fleeting introspection at the threshold, sending ripples through my time there."
- "Sometimes labels are funny, as are patterns of behavior, stigmas, even stereotypes, being interpellated in a bank."

“Masking (Personality).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 4 Jan. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(personality).
- "In psychology and sociology, masking is the process in which an individual camouflages their natural personality or behaviour to conform to social pressures, abuse or harassment."

Bonnell, Victoria E. “Identities in Transition: Eastern Europe and Russia After the Collapse of Communism.” EScholarship, University of California, https://escholarship.org/.

Krastev, Ivan, and Stephen Holmes. “Explaining Eastern Europe: Imitation and Its Discontents.” Journal of Democracy, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/explaining-eastern-europe-imitation-and-its-discontents-2/.
-"Fear of diversity is at the core of the rise of European illiberalism, but it has a different meaning in the East than in the West. In Western Europe, illiberalism is born of the fear that liberal societies are unable to cope with diversity. In the East, the question is how to prevent diversity from arising in the first place."

View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture. “Blending in and Standing out - Camouflage and Masking as Queer...” View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2014/5-queer-images/blending-in-and-standing-out-camouflage-and-masking-as-queer.

Liza's experiences:

"Last years summer break - just like most - I spent with my family in Moscow. My grandma needed to go for cancer treatments in Moscow so my parents and I brought her with us to our apartment. During one of the evenings we were all watching a movie, which had a male gay couple, in love. As usual, my grandma expressed her disgust towards the subject - and as usual, I had to hold in my anger and sadness."

"A few years ago, during another summer break, I was staying with my biological father and my step family. We were driving back home when I remember I got into a very passionate argument with my stepmom about feminism and queer community, expressing that I am part of one. After some silence I put my headphones on but before I chose my songs, I heard my stepmom say, 'Don't worry, she'll get over it. It's just a phase'. I was so angry, I just screamed 'I can hear you!'"

During our brainstorming, we were trying to come up with a way to portray our feelings and experiences with homophobia back in our home counties. Already we decided to focus on an experience - and so we ended up using the tool of masking - or using an actual mask - as our point of view during those events, making it personal and interactive.

That thought process led us to design a box, that would have one illustration for each experience, accompanied with audio to further enhance the experience. We thought this method would submerge the participant into our experience and thus provoke a conversation and a discussion between all the participants.

We decided to discuss masking in our cultures context, and what it means to us as queer-identifying when we are in our respectable countries:
Daniel: "I take my mask out of my pocket when I am boarding into the plane going back home."
Liza: "I put my mask on when I’m with my grandparents And my mask is semi covering my face when I’m with my fathers family."

We discovered that the act of wearing a mask is a transformative experience. It allows us to be someone we are not for a brief period, altering how we see ourselves and how we behave in public, as well as how others perceive us.

Daniel: "Sometimes I see myself putting this mask as an identity restriction, setting bounds for my ordinarily performing identity, in order to fit into a space that may not embrace or understand me, a tool to limit myself for the sake of safety."

Daniel's experiences:

"During the Winter break, I returned to Romania to spend the holidays with my family. I was seated next to a sailor who was also working in Rotterdam, and we began talking about what we were both doing in the Netherlands. We got some nice conversions telling me how much he missed home, how he needed to buy a giant plush bear for his niece, showing me pictures of her, and asking me for advice on where to buy it. Everything was super nice and chill when all of a sudden he started to curse a guy with long hair, calling him slurs thinking that he might be part of the LGBTQ+ community, telling me how sick of these people he is, and other bad words that are not even worth mentioning. I was completely shocked, still processing how we just talking about his niece seconds before and were now caught in this sea of swearing, unaware that the guy sitting next to him, me, was a member of the LGBTQ+. On the other side of the row, I made eye contact with a girl who was equally shocked by what had just happened, and I believe we both agreed that, regrettably, this is the mentality of many people in our country."

"Having dinner with my whole family, especially on events like Christmas is not always easy. Since I have left my home country and see my family less and less sometimes spending time with them feels like an interrogation. They ask personal questions about my life, which is entirely normal, but when it comes to my sexual life, things get a bit awkward. Not all of my family members know that I am gay so when they ask questions like “are you coming home with a dutch girl?” not only that I get cringed but also get uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because I have to lie or simply avoid answering the question, which becomes tiring after a while, but I do it to avoid a conversation with some of my homophobic relatives, for which I lack the mental strength to change their minds."

GOAL:
Start a conversation and create a safe space for queer and ally people to share their experiences in a homophobic environment.

PLAN:
During our presentation, we would first like the participants to "experience" the box. After we would like to propose after sharing our experiences with a homophobic environment, to hopefully encourage the participants to share their stories and start a conversation.

GROUP: Daniel, Liza

During the beginning of this project, our group consisted of four people - however, we needed up not settling on one subject, which created an issue through out the duration of this project. We decided to part ways and split into duos, in which we found the efficiency in the more likely common ground.

The previous attempt of this project led us to exploring masking and identity. During the initial stages, we took the matter to discuss the common ground - the concept - from which we could later go off into brainstorming the visualisation of the concept. We found a common characteristics, which became the main topic of our concept, them being - our background and country of origin and our queerness being the reoccurring hate subject in our respectable backgrounds.

Thus we decided to focus on the topic of personality-masking as a queeridentifying in Eastern Europe. To elaborate, both of us are from Eastern Europe - Daniel is from Romania and Liza is from Russia - and both of us are a part of LGBTQ+ - Daniel is gay and Liza is queer identifying. It is a well known fact that Eastern Europe is behind Western Europe on progression such as the understanding and acceptance of LGBTQ+ identifying community. When discussing our identities, this became our starting point to research and brainstorm this subject further.

When doing our research to confirm our basic knowledge about our cultures' homophobia, we found that it is pretty common through out Eastern Europe, existing as well in countries such as Bulgaria, Poland and etc, as the "fear of diversity is at the core [...] is born of the fear that liberal societies are unable to cope with diversity [in the West]. In the East, the question is how to prevent diversity from arising in the first place" (Krastev).

As well, we found that we connect our personal feelings and experiences to one of the theory texts, Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin (the phrases that stood out are highlighted on the right). Especially the phrase, "Gay identity is a paradox of freedom and containment", made us realise the privilege queers have in Western Europe and reminded us of the hardships we faced as queer-identifying back in our home-countries (Jeremy Atherton Lin)(Krastev).

As homosexuality is not publicly accepted in most of Eastern Europe, whenever we are there, we often hide this part - our sexuality - of our identities from the public eye, pretty much masking AKA putting a mask to imitate the general cis-identifying public (Wikipedia)(View).

So this common ground encouraged us to pursuit the concept of masking and rather dive deeper into the topic, allowing our personal feelings to further encourage our brainstorming process for this project.

We came up with a design for our experience - a box, with a mask, once you look through, you can see images with the sound. That allows for a perfect submerging for the participants, into experiencing our stories (on the right side), from "our points of view". As well we created audio, which at last made rather an audio-visual experience - which we thought would be an effective medium to experience our stories.

Durning the process of creating the box, we decided to ask for help from the Interaction Station, where they helped up create a code through Arduino for the lights and audio.

We did ran into a few hiccups during the process, being - the technical part of the lights and audio - which inevitably forced us to invest a much longer time into this project. However we decided not to give up and pursued it till success.

As well another edition we made to the box, was to the mask as one of the feedback sessions suggested we experiment with the touch, and not just audio and visuals - so we added spikes to the mask (made of paper-mache). We thought it would be a great sensory addition to the experience that we wanted to portray. The mask resembles almost a toucher devices - with the spikes and collar red - which we think signifies well our feelings during those homophobic experiences, making it us feel as if being "tortured on the inside".