This October, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries welcomes durational performance artist, scholar, and educator Raegan Truax to Los Angeles for a month of research, performance, exhibition, and conversation centered on queer archives, embodiment, and time.
Truax’s extended engagement with ONE brings their durational performance practice into direct conversation with the heritages held in the archive. Working across performance, research, and pedagogy, Truax explores how bodies carry knowledges across time and space and how sustained acts of attention, presence, and vulnerability can offer ways of encountering the past. Their time at ONE will encompass an exhibition, a workshop, a performance supported by USC Visions and Voices, and public talk at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.
The exhibition Being Beside (on view October 1, 2026-January 23, 2027) extends these questions through an encounter between Truax’s own performance archive and artworks and archival materials selected from ONE’s collections. At its center are Truax’s sandpaper body prints from two earlier iterations of Citation, durational performances staged in 2014 for 34 hours and in 2017 for 37 hours. Bearing physical traces of the artist’s body as they channeled previous feminist and queer performances, these works are placed in conversation with artists and cultural figures represented in ONE’s collections, including Ivy Bottini, Kate Millett, Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Eve Fowler, Jerri Allyn, Maren Hassinger, and Laura Aguilar. Across different generations, media, and practices, the exhibition considers the body as a site of knowledge, memory, experimentation, pleasure, vulnerability, and political possibility. Rather than approaching the archive solely as a repository of historical subjects, Being Beside asks what it might mean to work alongside queer and feminist artists across time—to place bodies, objects, and traces into proximity and allow new relationships to emerge between them.
At the center of the residency is in the same place, a 46-hour durational performance taking place continuously at ONE Archives from Friday, October 23 at 1 p.m. through Sunday, October 25 at 11 a.m. Drawing inspiration from queer histories held within ONE’s collections as well as Truax’s understanding of the body as a living archive, the performance asks what it means to inhabit the same physical and imaginative spaces as those who came before us. Through practices of staying with, listening, and laboring beside archival traces, Truax considers how queer heritages surface and persist across bodies, places, and generations.
The performance is part of a series of USC Visions and Voices events at ONE beginning October 14 with Untimely Practices, an interactive workshop for students exploring the relationship between everyday behavior, durational practice, and alternative experiences of time. The series concludes on October 27 with ON DURATION: A Talkback with Raegan Truax and Alexis Bard Johnson, a public conversation about the research, ideas, and preparation behind in the same place and Truax’s larger commitment to durational performance as a queer feminist artistic medium. Truax will also speak at the USC Roski School of Art and Design on October 13, extending the conversation to students and artists across USC.
The month-long engagement reflects ONE’s commitment not only to preserving queer histories but also to creating opportunities for artists to encounter, interpret, and activate archival materials in new ways. Truax’s work approaches the archive as something that extends beyond documents and objects: history is also carried through bodies, gestures, memories, relationships, and practices of repetition and care. Bringing a durational performance artist into sustained proximity with ONE’s collections creates space to consider what forms of knowledge emerge when archival research itself becomes embodied and durational.
Truax is the founder of ON DURATION, an intergenerational and international platform supporting durational artists in collective creative research and public praxis, and Executive Director of Creative Body Institute. Their work has been presented internationally at CounterPulse in San Francisco, Berlin Art Week, ZK/U Berlin, Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, and SOMArts in San Francisco, and is included in the Marina Abramović Institute’s Immaterial Archive.
While in Los Angeles, Truax will also be available for invited lectures, class visits, conversations, and studio visits with artists, scholars, students, and members of the broader Los Angeles arts community. Those interested in connecting with Truax during their time at ONE are encouraged to contact ONE Archives for more information.
Raegan Truax’s programs at ONE Archives take place October 14–27, 2026, and are free and open to the public. Advance RSVP is requested for individual Visions and Voices events.