Building the queer archive we couldn’t find in North Macedonia
Archives are often understood as places that preserve the past. But for communities whose histories have been fragmented, erased, or left outside institutional memory, they can also become spaces where new relationships to the past — and the future — are imagined.
I cannot point to a single moment when the idea of building a queer archive in North Macedonia emerged. It was less a decision than a gradual realization that accompanied our work through Butchkuruzh, a queer artistic initiative that my collaborator Blagica Petrova and I, Dushica Lazova, started in North Macedonia last November.
As our artistic practice and community projects evolved, we realized that what was missing was not only a place to preserve our own work, but a shared space where LGBTQI+ lives, memories, and cultural production could continue to accumulate beyond the lifespan of individual projects.
From artistic practice to archival questions
Together with Blagica, as queer individuals and activists living and working in North Macedonia, we established Butchkuruzh out of a shared curiosity about an alternative history of gender transgression — namely, the hidden and less known queer stories inhabiting our local culture, traditions, and folklore. Rather than treating tradition as a stable inheritance, we became interested in what happens when we reread it from unexpected vantage points. This project was partly to demonstrate how queer people have always been here, and partly because we are drawn to the gaps, contradictions, and ambiguities that make every culture available for alternative and “forbidden” readings.
Nodding to this methodological “disobedience,” our name comes from the word bučkuruš, a disorderly mixture of incompatible or “odd” things, to which we added a little gendered twist, thus embracing the productive possibilities of messiness, contradiction, and unresolved (queer) identities.
Caption: Filthy Days cabaret show in North Macedonia. Photo used with permission.
Our first projects dived into these questions. A drag king cabaret show that explored masculinity, performance, and lesbian and trans embodiments through satire and local cultural references, supported by the Festival of Feminist Culture and Action — “First Born Girl.” Then early this year, we came up with “Filthy Days,” a conceptual community-led party developed for the off-program of the Skopje Pride Weekend Festival, which took inspiration from the folkloric period of the “unbaptized” days — a liminal interval between the old and the new year — to imagine what might happen if ritual itself became available for queer reinvention. These projects were temporary by nature. They unfolded through performance, conversation, participation, and shared presence.
Afterward, however, we kept returning to the same practical question: What happens once an event or a gathering is over?
We have the photographs and video materials, the research, the rehearsal notes, conversations, and countless small traces that never become part of the public presentation. They accumulate almost without notice, quietly forming their own historical record. We realized that we were already documenting our work, but we were doing so in fragmented ways — across hard drives, social media platforms, folders, personal collections, and our own memory.
Caption: Filthy Days cabaret show in North Macedonia. Photo used with permission.
The archive as a collective practice
Searching for queer histories in North Macedonia often means searching through fragments. Some histories have been preserved by activists, artists, feminist and LGBTQI+ organizations, or through personal collections that survived because someone cared enough to keep them. Others exist only in oral histories, scattered photographs, zines, posters, or memories tied to spaces that have since disappeared. Thinking about this lack of documentation made us realize that it affects how communities imagine themselves across generations. When histories remain dispersed, every generation is forced to begin again, searching for points of reference that are difficult to access or were never formally preserved.
At the same time, I have become increasingly skeptical of the idea that archives should aim to produce complete or definitive histories. After all, archives have colonial roots. Every archive is shaped by decisions about what is collected, how it is categorized, and whose voices ar4e foregrounded. Community archives are no exception. They, too, involve choices, omissions, and responsibility.
Perhaps this is why I have come to think less about archives as “repositories” and more as “relationships.” An archive is not only a collection of materials; it is also a way of connecting people, stories, places, and moments that might otherwise remain isolated from one another. It creates contexts in which individual fragments begin to speak differently simply because they are placed alongside others. For queer communities, this feels especially important. Our histories have often survived not through institutions but through curious genealogies — radical networks of care, friendships, artistic collaborations, and informal transmissions. It seems only fitting that an archive should emerge through similar forms of collective participation rather than institutional authority.
This thinking became the starting point for our current project: Developing a digital queer archive together with the community.
Rather than designing the platform in isolation, we are organizing consultations with LGBTQI+ community members to think collectively about how such an archive should function. Questions of accessibility, navigation, anonymity, trust, and participation cannot be solved through technology alone. They are social and political questions as much as technical ones. We are equally interested in what the archive contains and in the conditions that make someone feel comfortable enough to contribute to it.
The archive will certainly document our ongoing and future projects — our performance work, community workshops, book club meetings, archival storytelling, and more! – but that is only the surface layer. We also envision a space where stories, public appearances, personal photographs, news articles, ephemera, publications, artistic works, and other traces of queer life can gradually gather over time – not to create a single narrative of queer history in North Macedonia, but to acknowledge its multiplicity.
Building an unfinished archive
Digital technologies offer possibilities that are particularly meaningful for communities whose histories have often remained dispersed. They allow archives to grow incrementally, to connect people across different regions, and to remain open to future contributions. At the same time, they also require careful thinking about privacy, consent, moderation, and safety. Visibility has never been an uncomplicated goal for queer communities, and an ethical archive must also make room for opacity, anonymity, and different levels of participation.
Perhaps this is why I no longer think of the archive primarily as a place where the past is stored. I have come to see it as an infrastructure that makes continuity possible. Because of that, the archive we are building will remain unfinished by design.
Developed (as we speak!) as an interactive website, it will continue to change as new materials, voices, and perspectives enter into conversation with one another. If there is one hope that accompanies this project, it is not that we will finally produce a comprehensive queer history. Rather, it is that someone looking for traces of queer life in North Macedonia a decade from now might encounter something more than scattered fragments. They might discover not only performances, photographs, or stories, but a community that chose to preserve its own memories, however partial, contradictory, and unfinished they may be.
Prepared by Dushica Lazova
