"Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations." –Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
This exhibition began with an invitation.
To spend time together—with an artist, with an archive, and with “heritages” that continue to breathe.
For durational performance artist Raegan Truax, the archive is oxygen. Not a repository of finished stories or history passed…. but a constellation of “heritages,” Truax’s preferred term for bodies encountering other bodily knowledges across time. A place where what has disappeared might become perceptible again through attention, repetition, and contact. Archival research begins with being with: spending time, listening, moving, and allowing heritages to surface on their own terms. Truax’s performances resist reenactment in favor of embodiment, asking how queer inheritances might be encountered without simply reperforming the past. Repetition, after all, is never the same. It is a practice of returning in order to discover what has changed, what endures, and what still calls to us.
Every object at ONE Archives arrived because someone entrusted another person with their history. A photograph, a shirt, a letter, a flyer—each was offered with the hope that it would continue to live beyond the life of its maker. Archives are built through these acts of generosity. They ask us not only to preserve the past, but to care for futures we cannot yet imagine.
Curating this exhibition required a similar kind of trust.
Truax entrusts viewers with the visceral heritage unearthed during Citation (2014 & 2017), where the tactile abrasive sandpaper transfers exhibited hold over seventy-one hours of live performed durational entanglements with queer feminist art. We entrust Truax with the heritages contained within and beyond the archive. The archival works gathered in dialogue entrust us to attend to their traces as neither evidence nor illustrations of a particular performance or political moment. They are companions to the queer heritage Truax summons in and with their durational performances. Drawn from the collections of ONE Archives and presented alongside Truax's sandpaper rubbings and performance artifacts, they respond to shared questions of touch, citation, transfer, endurance, and queer inheritance. Together they ask how memory moves—from body to body, object to object, generation to generation—and what it means to carry another person's history with care.
This project is itself an experiment in trust: between donors and the archive, between archive and artist, between artist and curator, between bodies and durations, and finally between these objects and the viewers and audiences who choose to spend time being beside them. It asks what might become possible when we resist the impulse to know in advance and instead remain present long enough for meaning to surface on its own terms.
Perhaps this is what an archive offers.
Not certainty, but attention.
Not possession, but stewardship.
Not a fixed past, but a living relationship—one that continues to breathe through the people willing to spend time with and beside it.
This exhibition will be on view beginning October 1, 2026. Raegan Truax will be in residence during the month of October at ONE Archives. They will add to the exhibition over the month, culminating in their 46-hour performance October 23-25. The exhibition, in its final state, will remain open until January 23, 2027.
Raegan Truax is a durational performance artist, scholar, and educator whose work explores time, embodiment, and queer feminist performance practices. They hold a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University and MA degrees in Performance Studies and Gender Politics from New York University. Truax is the founder of ON DURATION and executive director of Creative Body Institute. Their work has been presented internationally at venues including CounterPulse in San Francisco, Berlin Art Week, ZK/U Berlin, Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, and SOMArts in San Francisco. Their work is also featured in Marina Abramović Institute’s Immaterial Archive. They are committed to an overtly queer and feminist durational practice that challenges masochistic tropes of endurance. For them, it is a practice of risk, struggle, vulnerability, connection, presence, and possibility. @raegan.truax
This exhibition is open to everyone. Our usual hours are 10am-5pm, Tuesday through Saturday. ONE Archives at the USC Libraries operates all of its programs and activities consistent with the University’s Notice of Non-Discrimination. Participation in our programs is not restricted based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
