Queer Van Kult: The House Wears Our Memory Like Skin

Queer Van Kult: The House Wears Our Memory Like SkinOctober 11, 2025 | Alice Austen House Museum, Staten Island, NY

5:00 – 8:00 PM

On National Coming Out Day, Staten Island-based queer arts collective Queer Van Kult (QVK) presents a one-day, site-specific performance and installation event at the Alice Austen House and its surrounding waterfront park. Taking place on October 11, 2025, QVK presents a poetic act of remembrance, reflection, and reclamation—honoring queer lineage, local memory, and personal transformation through sculpture, performance, sound, and immersive installations.

Developed in collaboration with the Alice Austen House Museum, QVK invites the public to wander a landscape charged with objects, gestures, and offerings—conduits of grief, joy, queer identity, and cultural archaeology.

Artist Statement

Queer Van Kult: The House Wears Our Memory Like Skin is a site-responsive offering—a ritual of remembrance, transformation, and queer imagination. We are intervening in the land, in time, in memory.

This project is an homage to the places that shaped us, the people who saved us, and the ghosts that haunt and hold us. It is our love letter to chosen family, queer ancestors, abandoned objects, and the stories written into the shorelines and shadows of Staten Island.

Alice Austen House—once a home, now a historic LGBTQ+ landmark—serves as a grounding point. We scatter personal relics across its grounds: driftwood shrines, embedded household objects, hair in the hills, pantyhose stuffed with memory. We reflect on queer solitude, secrecy, lineage, and the process of becoming.

We ask: What do we inherit? What do we carry? What are we ready to leave behind?

This is not a monument. This is a living archive. A temporal, embodied queer spell.

https://aliceausten.org/events/queer-van-kult-x-alice-austen-house/

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