Retroactive Selfies – Harry Heuser

31st August 20261st September 2026

Enveloped: Wrappings, Unfoldings, and the Outside Chance of Queer Interiority

Down memory lane. Sounds rather cozy, when you put it like that. The kind of trip an afternoon with an old photo album on your lap can afford. But that is not the lap I have been taking, the road I just went down and took back. Not even a road, really, and certainly no one-way street.

I am talking real, physical travel by plane, train and automobile to meet with real people that, over the years, have become almost imaginary to me, so distant is the past I spent in their presence and so unreliable my recall of them by way of ephemera—a smattering of snapshots rather too random, selective and pixellated to seem true-to-life. You know, recollections turned into collectibles, keepsakes of what is lost—an ersatz of essence that leaves you with a sketchy, shifting narrative and a suspicion that the storytelling is being botched by an unreliable curator remiss in handling the responsibility of keeping and making sense of a life encoded in delicate objects that are imbued with an arcane knowledge lodged in the personal reminiscences of more than one person.

Quite a spaghetti junction, that fabled memory lane. Prosaically speaking, although that has never been my chosen mode of articulation, I recently returned from a visit to my native Germany—or the Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia, to be precise. As on my previous trip the year before, I caught up with family and friends, some of whom I had not seen in over forty years.

So as not to overshadow the momentousness of that rare occasion, I did not get to witness the once-in-what’s-left-of-my-lifetime solar eclipse, the spectacle of which we let pass us by while the three of us were ensconced indoors engaged in an exchange of memories. No ill-fitting goggles or colanders required.

Just as fittingly, the coincidence of that celestial event occurring on the eve of our remarkable reunion has been commemorated as a new beginning by one of my friends, who set up a WhatsApp group titled “Sonnenfinsternis 26,” “Sonnenfinsternis” being German for solar eclipse. We did not miss a thing—just each other and the opportunity to make new memories, until now.

I even spent a night—the first in thirty-nine years—in my former bedroom at my mother’s house, a 1970s bungalow I first revisited, albeit briefly, in 2022. During that reencounter, I set foot once more in the shared bathroom, virtually unchanged, where, for about a year, from May 1985 to June 1986, I photographed myself—or my body, at any rate—to image and imagine my queer identity.

A time capsule of 1970s interior design, demolished not long after my 2022 reencounter with it, the bathroom, and the poignancy of my experience of which, led me to conceive The Return of/to the Boy in the Avocado Bathtub, a narrative art project of which my current project, Enveloped, is a prequel of sorts.

Continue reading “Enveloped: Wrappings, Unfoldings, and the Outside Chance of Queer Interiority”

10th May 202625th May 2026

Leaping at “Elastic”: Resourceful Play, Perpetual Replayfulness, and the Inflexibility of the Museal Dis-playground

“Not by any stretch of the imagination.” That is what a friend of mine used to say—and perhaps says it still—whenever something struck him as unreasonable or preposterous. Considering how firmly the expression remained stuck in the layers of my neocortex after all those decades, much struck him that way—and, to this day, much does strike me the wrong way about it. Possibly, I am not flexible enough in my definition of “friendship,” but that one did not endure.

“Not by any stretch of the imagination.” Seriously? I mean, any? It makes me want to object that the imagination is, or can be, more tensile than the minds of those who utter the phrase seem capable of conceiving. And while the characteristically flexuous line of reasoning I am giving over to it might stretch anyone’s patience, elasticity—both literal and metaphoric—is very much at the heart of these idiosyncratic reflections on children’s games and childhood memories, on contemporary art—creative practice “by any stretch of the imagination”—and the role cultural institutions such as museums play in keeping alive memory that, collective though it may be, can be profoundly and confoundedly personal.

It was my encounter with Children’s Games by Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs in the summer of 2025 that made me launch into the matter, belatedly as ever, creatively to prolong my experiences, whether they last minutes or extent to more than half a lifetime.

The fact that I am posting this entry on what, in many parts of the world, is commemorated as Mother’s Day, enters into the anfractuous musings that follow.

17th October 202417th October 2024

Retroactive Selfies: Hidden Snapshots, Open Wounds

“Keeping up with the out-of-date” am I? Well, sometimes the motto I chose for this journal hits home like a slap in the face. Not a knock-out punch, mind. Just the kind of cuff that crimsons the cheek all the more because it is unnervingly public. Now, I am not slap-happy. If I keep going way back for more and go on reflecting at length on the ostensibly passé that others could care less about it is because, to my mind, time is not of the essence. That lingering tingle is, and I sting easily.

Whether or not we engage with it, there is no out-of-date as long as our memory serves. Or, rather, it dictates, like a fingerpost redirecting us into the remotest regions of our mental landscape. When it comes to our past, it matters little how long ago an experience dates back or however long in the tooth we are getting. The past can still get at us, provided we are fortunate enough—if indeed we feel quite so appreciative—to have faculties that keep us from letting bygones be … well, you know the rest.

18th February 20238th August 2024

Retroactive Selfies: The Return to/of the Boy in the Avocado Bathtub

For my exhibition Asphalt Expressionism (Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries, 13 Feb. – 28 Apr. 2023), I once again rummaged through decades-old photo albums in search of pictures of myself as a walker in New York City. Some of them had been displayed as part of my show Travelling Through: Landscapes/Landmarks/Legacies in 2018-19.

As I browsed those old albums, I was reminded of an unsettling homecoming in 2022, when, on a dark December afternoon, I returned to my mother’s house for the first time in about thirty-four years. I had lived in that house – one in a row of unassuming bungalows in a small town in the dull flatness of North-Rhine Westphalia – for about fifteen years, during which time, in the process of growing up that many deem concluded all too prematurely, I gathered a great many memories, not many of them great, that made me eager to forget the place. And although my skin never developed the thickness of an elephant’s hide, I cannot but remember.

You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe reminds us; but when we do return to the places we once called home – whether by choice or not – it can hit home hard that whatever home may be is a construct the mind makes even when it is not made up on that point. A lot of what happened or befell us where we come back for a second or umpteenth look is bound to topple from the shelves to which we relegated some of those none-too-precious but relentlessly durable mental keepsakes.

The living room in my parents’ house was never my place, even though it held several attractions: a good stereo system, courtesy of my maternal grandmother, and, after years of resistance from my father, who held that the technology had not been perfected yet, a colour television set. My room was more of a listening post; apart from drawings I made, the comics I consumed and the magazines I scoured for material to luxuriate in, vivid dreams were produced there, many with the aid of a radio and cassette recorder.

Since then, my Kinderzimmer had been repurposed, although its current state said nothing more distinctly about its present purpose than “spare.” None of the cheap furnishings had survived, and the change of décor did little to revive, revise or confirm the images that, originating there, I had been carrying in my mind since the late 1980s.

It was the most private place in the house – the shared bathroom – that brought back the identity crises I experienced growing up queer: the shame of developing breasts that waited long for the development of pectoral muscles; the attempts at concealing the unseemly tissue by stretching my t-shirts and tying them around my genitals; the anxieties that caused me to scratch the skin off my ankles that, raw and oozy, were then soaked, doctor’s orders, in a bidet filled with salty water.

Memories tend to come back faster and with greater force when we return to the places where there were made. That was certainly the case when I stepped into Mutti’s abode (my father having left and since died decades ago). The interior was like a time capsule. Not only the furniture was unchanged, but all the bric-a-brac was still in the same spots my mother had set aside for their display and regular dusting.

The self-exploration that happened in that room also took a creative turn, as, transitioning from adolescence to dreaded adulthood, I took what I now call retroactive selfies: photographs of my body that I initially produced mainly for my eyes only but that I am now, in this post, making public for the first time via the social medium of blogging so as further to blur boundaries the maintenance of which can cause so much sustained and needless suffering.

Once we do decide to “come out,” we soon realize that we do not come out once only: we must do so over and over again, and each time we come out – and come out looking – differently, like an inadvertent burst of digital photographs that, owing to a finger staying put too long, shows our poses changing and our masks slipping.

Excusing myself from the dinner table during my short visit to my mother’s, I secreted myself in the bathroom, that anti-parlour of abjection. Not that I needed to go. What I needed was to go look at myself in the mirror that, in my youth, became a lens of self-exploration. I needed to return to the spot where I had once stood and posed – donning masks and dappled in spraypainted dots – a young person, once called “the battle of the sexes” by a classmate, learning to live in and with the strangeness of a changing body, an organism that I seemed to be invading and that rejected me as much as I was rejecting it.

Uneasy, curious and ever self-reflexive, the boy in the avocado bathroom is not gone, though none may recognize him now. He is a persona still grappling with the challenge of achieving personhood: a retroactive selfie.