Description
Drawing on theories of queer futurity and queer childhood, this presentation draws on the fairy to deconstruct archival order, and explore the shy imagination. Fairies are ephemeral, inhabiting unexplored paths on the map and gaps in rationality. As with archival materials, fairies are also, in the sense of tales passed down across eras, enduring. Moreover, people have historically searched for evidence of fairies, notably documented by Arthur Conan Doyle, who made known his belief in the existence of fairies following the Cottingley photographic hoax. Uniting discourses on the search for fairies and that of archived media, this presentation addresses the fairy's pertinence to the often-wordless affective structure of shyness. This presentation delves into an encounter with the Cottingley fairy archives in Leeds, and brings these materials into a dialogue with modernist novelist Virginia Woolf. Woolf's fiction grapples with the task of finding the right words to give shape to visual and affective encounters. Characters in her fiction often struggle to communicate with each other on an emotional level, while their internal monologues prove rich with fleeting visuality. Identifying the presences of the fairy in these monologues, this research posits the fairy as an embodiment of shyness, an affect reimagined as an anticipatory creative force (a reading influenced by the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz). Read as a photographic and/or cinematic projection, the fairy gives shape to the flickering potentiality of the shy childhood imagination where spoken words falter.| Period | 20 Mar 2026 |
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| Held at | Centre for Design History |
| Degree of Recognition | Local |