Diarmuid: I'm interested in untold queer stories or the untold parts of queer history. I wrote a history book; You both made a film, but you didn't just make a film, you made an 80s TV show. Can I ask you, what on earth inspired you to make that formal choice?

Naomi: Sophie and I met in academia at Cambridge, but we also had other artistic practices. When we began working together, we were really interested in interpretation. I came to interpretation from my background as a classical musician. I'm a conductor and a pianist. I've always been interested in interpretation, partly because in French, the word for a performer is an ‘interprète’. So I was really interested in asking: what is the relationship between performance and interpretation?

Sophie came to interpretation from her lens as an artist, writer, and a scholar. So it seemed an obvious thing for us to look at the past and interpret it, not in the traditional academic way, but interpreting it through performance instead. Asking what it means to do academic research through a different medium.

Sophie: I think one element of our project and collaboration has also always been to research unusual forms or formats in the archival materials that we discovered. For example, we looked at Pauline Oliveros's postcards that she developed with her friend Alison Knowles, the Fluxus artist, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's use of analog slides in her performances. So from the beginning we’ve been interested in finding materials or ‘minor works’ that seem peripheral to someone's practice, or might not have made it into the canon because they're not considered ‘major works’, and then using these materials almost as a score or prompt for interpretation.

We came across the Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions as part of our archival scholarship during the pandemic, and discovered a whisper network of feminists and queers, through letters and various other formats that might have slipped through the cracks of official history or art history. So, we were also excited to discover this talk show [bingenTV] which is another sort of ‘minor genre’. I’ve long been interested in minor genres…

Diarmuid: Maybe we can talk about the 1980s; the aesthetic, the language, the look. Was that something that was particularly important when you were thinking about how to interpret this work?

Naomi: One of the really crucial things for the show in the 1980s is the relationship to Section 28. The reason why the show was cancelled was because of Section 28, largely, and there's a lot of references to this in the show, both explicitly and implicitly, especially in the final ‘weeds episode’. This moment of queer censorship in the UK is important to know about and is emblematic of queer censorship through history and across time. It's very similar to a lot of the discourse and language we see today around trans people. That's a moment that we really wanted to remember in the exhibition presentation as well.

Sophie: Exactly. Sometimes when systems of oppression are particularly virulent, there's also a kind of outpouring of joy or ‘recalcitrance’ —to use a word from the film. The ‘80s embody that, in a way.

Naomi: I should actually say that we do have Ashley Au [the composer of the music for bingenTV] here with us today. We had a great conversation with Ashley yesterday in the gallery and something we talked about was how sound can conjure feelings and experiences, often in ways that we're not necessarily explicitly conscious of. A tiny sound can bring us back to memories of watching Maury Povich or Ricki Lake on sick days at home, or Whitney Houston songs or whatever. I think a lot of these relationships and feelings are much more unconscious, but that doesn't make them any less real or more valuable.

Sophie: Something we are very interested in, in our practice, is a concept that we borrowed from Elizabeth Freeman, and that is ‘temporal drag’. Obviously, a lot of us are familiar with notions of drag as gender performance. But Freeman makes this important claim drag can also be temporal: that the past can exert an influence on us that drags out in a physical sense; it’s still lagging behind or has a hold over us. That attachment to the past can also conjure the feeling of ambivalence. Temporal drag is not just about joy, but it’s also about confusion and ambivalence, being attached to things from the past that might affect us or that we embody in a certain way.

The ‘80s is an interesting period for being a repressive or regressive time, but also significant for queer history. That notion of temporal drag is very important to us in the whole exhibition, because, to be honest, it's about bringing different voices together from the past and present, across space and time, and undoing the notion of a clear trajectory or clear temporality.

Diarmuid: I was teaching Tender Buttons, the other week, for my sins. One of the things we talked about in the class on Gertrude Stein was queer desire, queer historiography, and experimental form. It feels like when we talk of queer desire, we always have to talk about: how does that inflect the form of these things? My book is rather conventional, it's a history book, it runs from a narrative. A talk show is also quite conventional, right? I mean, it trades in a lot of the kind of usual, conventional, normative forms. I mean, at one point, bingenTV is referred to as a national broadcast.

Do you feel like the producers in the show felt like there was a compulsion to be experimental? Or, to make this show for a wide audience, in spite of the fact that it's in a gallery? 

Sophie: Yes. bingenTV clearly a show interested in working within certain parameters, certain conventions, gesturing towards conventions of what a TV show does, how people talk and interact, the kind of music or transitions that are used, the branding, the show’s own mug, the neon sign, the fake plants—that's a given form in terms of props and structure.

In terms of language, it seems to me that it treads a fine line between being accessible, but then always has these moments of slippage, where you're suddenly surprised that something weird or wild or unexpected is happening, or someone says something that sort of trips you up. Or there are some words that maybe wouldn't have been used or wouldn't be used on mainstream television. I mean, maybe ‘recalcitrance’ is one of them, which is one of my favourite words! Or all that Latin. I think the tv show actually really plays with form. It’s inviting you in and then creates moments that make you stumble. Like that moment when Pauly and Gardenia propagate a plant, and we have this cut to the scene which references a Psychic TV episode of Derek Jarman reading a very sombre passage. That reference could be someone who is a preacher or someone trying to manipulate the audience or alternatively speak truth to power. So again, this takes you off steady ground, but even when that happens, and you feel like ‘okay, maybe I understand what's going on’, we cut and see a completely different environment again. That's something that the show tries to navigate.

Naomi: You see the host and the guests themselves pushing against the boundaries of form, trying to test what the limits are. You hear Gardenia, in the final episode, where she sort of looks off to the corner and talks about the possibility of doing something ‘without profit’. This is really her talking to the producers and saying, ‘Yeah, I get that this show isn't gonna make you a lot of money. But don't you see? It's important.’ And so just seeing the people in the show test those limits in some way, working within constraints and pushing at the boundaries of what those constraints allow, can be even more interesting than just starting afresh from the ground up, because it looks at the tension points and finds the limits of form.

Diarmuid: It's no surprise to me that you should be interested in this kind of a form because that feels like a very good description of New Narrative. The rising experimental, queer writers in San Francisco in the 1970s, who played with the narrative convention, in that kind of reflexive way, trickles down through the likes of Chris Kraus and Maggie Nelson.

Naomi: I also think of someone like Jack Halberstam. And the blending of high and low. Trying to put those two things like immediately up against each other, very closely.

Sophie: Yeah, exactly. You can talk about Finding Nemo and at the same time talk about radical queer kinship.

Diarmuid: The TV show seems to be playing with a lot of opposites that are working through it, and the operative ones for me would be natural and unnatural. One of the figures who seems to be right at the centre of that dyad, is somebody like Claude Cahun. Can you tell me a little bit about that, a sense for the natural or artificial?

Sophie: Well, we've talked a lot about that distinction between nature and artifice as part of the larger project of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions. Queer people have often had to side with artifice, given that they've historically been seen as unnatural —so we sought both to reclaim, re-stamp, or attach something new to what nature might mean.

We wanted to revel in artifice as a kind of better nature or the more interesting nature. I personally have also been thinking about this for a long time, like with the corn project I did [Transpositions, 2018/2019], where I was really interested in corn as a hermaphroditic plant. Corn is a very queer plant that has all these different ways in which it can self-fertilise, through, for example, transplanting itself, using elements that mix and mingle and through copying and inserting various segments.

As a part of our research for the project, we've also come across all these interesting plants like fern. Ferns, for example, are non-binary, and they can change the gender depending on what the community needs. Sometimes the plant might be like, oh, yeah, you know, we need this or like, actually, you know, now we need this. Similarly, it’s Claude Cahun, actually, who talks about the non-binary ‘yew trees’ in the show.

Diarmuid: Claude Cahun said in a letter in 1946, that they wrote, that the men around them wanted them to be like plants in their garden, domesticated. This is the problem with the garden. It's an act of controlled occasion and has certain connotations with leisure, class and privilege. How should we understand gardening in this context, watching bingenTV?

Naomi: I think we definitely wanted to portray a complicated picture of gardening. We have a quote that we've been really inspired by and that shows up on the wall in the exhibition and on one of our postcards by Jamaica Kincaid writing about Vita Sackville-West. Vita Sackville West shows up in the film and is a person Sophie and I have long been interested in. In fact, like Eunice and Gardenia, Sophie and I paid a visit to Knole [Sackville-West’s family home in Sevenoaks, Kent] together. And that was an important part of our research and our friendship.

Jamaica Kincaid writes about Vita Sackville-West, and says that she has complicated feelings about Vita, and that she thinks you have to read Vita Sackville-West alongside Nina Simone, because, in the same way that there's no mention of gardening in Nina Simone's writing, there's also no mention of ‘the sad weight of the world’ in Vita Sackville-West’s. And so she said, if Vita Sackville West portrays this really beautiful, lovely picture of the garden and her life, you can look at what’s missing.

Vita Sackville-West was a woman of immense privilege, who lived an extremely charming, beautiful life, in her large houses with many staff who were actually doing gardening for her. I think seeing these juxtapositions and seeing what's missing from the dominant historical narratives of the garden was also important to us, in our presentation of this work.

Sophie: Also, a podcast we've been inspired by is Bad Gays, in which they talk about Stein as well.

I think this goes back to what I said earlier about temporal drag, and what I said about our kind of relationships to the past, which can be ambivalent. I don't think we always need to have a relationship to the past that is either just absolutely brilliant, or loving, or a full rejection, because actually, I think most of our relationships are kind of ambivalent, whether it's with real people, or with historical materials, or literary materials, and they might change over time. Because we learn new things, or the context changes, or you know, maybe it’s more interesting to actually learn something from art that is maybe even morally corrupt. I mean, I'm just thinking of Maggie Nelson's amazing book, The Art of Cruelty, where she talks about all these works of art that if we just stamp them as morally wrong or problematic, we wouldn't read them, we wouldn't go see them in exhibitions, but we might miss something because they test us in a way. I think it's very important to actually counter that narrative of censorship, and to ask ourselves: what do we do with this work? What do you actually do with it? What do we do with these people that are really complicated and problematic and wrong?

Diarmuid: I suppose in the uncovering and excavation of stories as queer people, we want something to identify with. ‘Fandom is the better kind of history’, as Gardenia says, but it's also kind of problematic, because it does void those more difficult aspects. In some ways, it’s a devotion. And that's one of the things I look at in my book with James Baldwin, who is an incredible Civil Rights activist, writer and icon who has been appraised recently in terms of a saint.

When you go back in and you look at some of his comments about the lesbian and gay movement, you know, his characterization of women, it’s not ideal, to say the least. One of the things that I was trying to do in the book was exactly what you're saying, deal with this ambivalence and say, ‘how do we confront this?’ And one of the solutions I came up with was to think of these figures not as saints or as idols, but as friends, you know, these elders that have lived through a different time. It feels like if we ignore those problems, we not only just let them off the hook, but we let the society in which they lived off the hook as well, because they absorb those values, and they weren’t immune from them.

Naomi: Yes, and I think one of the projects for us of uncovering The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions is that it's uncovering the ancestors that we need, not necessarily the ancestors that we have, but the ones we need to relate ourselves to. I'm obsessed with fandom as a concept. I'm not myself, typically a fan of many things, but I find the concept fascinating; sure it’s devotion and sometimes deification but it’s so artificial. I think when you’re a fan of something, you don’t actually think the thing is perfect, you just choose to devote yourself to an idea of the thing rather than the thing itself. I think fandom in that sense acknowledges—by its absence—the complicatedness of a person.

Sophie: Also, I think fandom is a method. We're not necessarily fans of all the people that we've discovered. But we've chosen fandom as our queer method, our research method.

Naomi: In the way that utopia is a method. In the way that envisioning a utopic world is not about saying, let's live in this perfect society. It's about saying: let's always gesture towards a better future, let's always imagine how the world could be a better place and orient ourselves in that direction.

Diarmuid: One of the things fandom does is it creates a community. For people who were academics at one point or another, I suppose it does bring in that very delectable transgressive, non-objective approach to subject, to history and to archives.

Sophie: Exactly. I want to gesture to the exhibition as well, because the film is just one element of the exhibition. It’s why we were interested in making less easily graspable forms or additional materials like those photographs printed on acetate that play with opacity and translucency, or the different textile pieces, because they make something tangible without explaining an approach or without following a very clear procedure. If we had written a history of all these figures, we would have had to be accountable to the academic rulebook. It's also about offering up materials to other people so they can take them away and do something with them.