friends outside Planet, Wolfgang Tillmans – Participant Interpretation

From a Manchester angle, this could be a queer Hacienda. Some ravetopia of yesteryear. It’s from 1992 Berlin but could’ve been shot last night, either here or there. Begging the question, have we moved much in our queer aesthetics and cultural output? Has our queer work started to mirror the ‘stuck-in-a-rutness’ of wider contemporary culture?

This photo would’ve been beautiful in ’92 but it’s been so mimicked and replicated it’s now lost its power, its charm. It doesn’t read the same. Tillmans has no control over this: he took the image for simple, honest reasons. Time passes. And as time does, so should we. Let’s love and see hope in the potential future, rather than an imagined past. The snapshot’s not for getting stuck in.

Like coming out of a relationship that’s stymied: “I love you, but we have to move on.”


– MT Hutchinson.

Listen to an audio description of friends outside planet, written and recorded by (Un)Defining Queer participant MT below: