VHS Late Tapes Takeover: LCVA presents POUT
The London Community Video Archive takes over for a Late Tapes screening of POUT Issue One, London’s groundbreaking queer video magazine which first launched in 1992.
Created by a collective of artists and activists with little to no money, POUT stood for provocative and out and used VHS as a platform to make media by and for queer people. Loud, rough, scrappy, sexy, funny, and defiantly political. POUT mixed satire, protest footage, and DIY creativity into a bold new form of activist video, which laid the groundwork for the decade.
Influenced by the cut-and-paste aesthetics of scratch video and Gay Sweatshop theatre, the collective combined satire, protest footage, television parodies, holiday home video and bold expressions of sexual desire. Leather dykes and faeries gossip and role play together, resisting homonormativity and playing with drag, food and each other.
Produced against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and Section 28, POUT offered a vital counter-archive to mainstream media’s hostility and silences. From the title alone, it's clear that the Pout collective were always confidently and defiantly queer, with their tongues firmly in their cheeks.
The screening will include a post screening conversation between POUT director, Mark Harriott and other members of the POUT collective with LCVA Project Director, Ed Webb-Ingall.