Description
This collaborative presentation shares our learnings from our volunteer co‐curated exhibition Desire Paths: Reading Queer Edinburgh (2025). By adopting a strong connecting theme we reinscribed queer history into Scotland’s built environment in a way that encouraged multiple voices and perspectives.Working with Lavender Menace, a Scottish grassroots community archive, we explored Edinburgh's histories through a queer lens. Drawing on diverse sources, stories, and places, the exhibition encouraged visitors to re‐examine their relationship with everyday Edinburgh spaces. We developed individual narratives as disparate as a 19th‐century lesbian boarding school scandal and the makings of an early transgender magazine. We needed to articulate these histories in an engaging way for our visitors to navigate.
We decided to use the ‘desire path’ to understand the ways in which marginalised individuals navigate the built environment. A ‘desire path’ is an illicit pathway forged by need or want in spite of design. Nobody gave these paths permission to be there, they are created by scores of people who chose to walk across the grass, creating a new path for others to follow. We took inspiration from these paths to narrate place‐based stories around historical events.
We will discuss how the ‘desire path’ operated as both a theoretical framework to articulate our individual and unapologetically subjective approach to select historical places, people, and moments to highlight. The idea of the path also anchored our approach to design and display tactics that emphasised choice and chance encounters for visitors. This included using collage techniques to design the interpretation panels and participatory elements where visitors could add their own stories to the map of Edinburgh.
Through our connecting theme, we produced an exhibition that made visible the paths and presence of queer people from the past and allowed our group to forge our own queer paths.
| Period | 25 Nov 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Queer Heritage and Collections Network Symposium |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Swindon, United KingdomShow on map |
Keywords
- queer
- heritage
- Museum Studies