react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Nathan Shui’s essay on the 2013 Beijing Queer Film Festival considers a new geography for queer spatial tactics of interpolation. A documentary still-frame included in the author’s essay displays a collage of photographs, blue lines, and other symbols affixed to what seems to be a typical road map of Beijing and surrounding areas. These annotations serve to make queer space visible while simultaneously obscuring official or government-approved modes of interacting with the city. For me, this brings critical attention to any map’s discursive obstruction. Maps are not neutral depictions of fact: like any representation they are selective and rhetorical.