January 24, 2025
Today, our class made our way down the mountain to pay a visit to the Queer Archive at the library of the University of Bergen. We were greeted and given a presentation by Bjørn André Widvey and Jo Hjelle, who both work in the archive.
The Queer Archive is part of the special collections section of the library and it opened in 2015, meaning this is their 10th anniversary! They have the mission to collect, document, and communicate Norwegian and Scandinavian queer history. The idea for the archive came about in 2012 when reference librarian Tone Hellesund organized a seminar about preserving queer history. At the seminar, activist Kim Friele announced her pledge to donate her collection to the library for the founding of the Queer Archive. The archive officially opened its doors in 2015.
The archive has many different types of materials. They include things such as Norway’s largest collection of queer magazines, posters from events, and other artifacts. One of the focuses of the archive is their oral history project, which Bjørn and Jo work on. The idea in the interviews is that the archive should have a collection of queer people telling their own stories, rather than only having old government documents tell their story. The archive has conducted over 230 interviews. They focus on capturing the stories of older people who may not live long enough to have their story heard. While the full interviews can only be viewed in person at the archive, there are clips online of each interviewee.
The process of creating each interview is not as easy as it may seem. First, the archive reaches out to people to ask for an interview. Names of people to interview may come from materials in the archive or recommendations from previous interviewees. The dates are set with the goal of recording 2-3 interviews a day. The recordings are all done in the interviewee’s home, and can take from 1 to 3 hours. Each interview is then spliced into a single video, checked for any content that may have to be removed for legal reasons (such as mentions of third-party individuals or medical information), and transcribed. All of the videos have English subtitles and the transcriptions are put into a digital collection so that they can be searched online.
After the presentation we were given the opportunity to see the physical archive. The archive consists of many categorized shelves with materials kept in organized grey boxes. There is also a large collection of materials that still need to be sorted and cataloged. Besides papers like magazines, official documents, or posters, the archive also contains some larger pieces. One includes a guitar used by activist Siri Kvalheim in marches during the 1980s. One thing that I found interesting is that there are song lyrics stuck to the side of the guitar. Bjørn explained that Siri could look down to read the words of whatever song she was singing, but the words were also an object of focus so she could drown out the verbal insults and screaming directed at the march.
After the archive, we had a free afternoon to explore! I went with a group to get a late lunch and visit a Christmas store! We were very lucky to have two sunny days in Bergen but today, the rain and wind have finally caught up with us. We headed back to the hotel and enjoyed a warm evening indoors.
