by Nanette Ashby
In this episode Nanette Ashby is joined by Rori Dior, a Berlin-based sex worker, anthropologist, activist, and co-founder of the archive Objects Of Desire. We discuss the ins and outs of creating and maintaining an archive such as Objects of Desire and the importance of institutional collaboration. We also highlight the influence of political environments, and which spaces are held by sex workers within art and history. Within the context of the fight to legitimize sex work as work, the collective behind Objects of Desire has created and curated an archive of objects and more importantly the stories behind them. These objects were received as gifts or accumulated by sex workers themselves. This archive illustrates the diversity within the sex worker community, their work, and the variety of clients.We also talk about Rori’s work as a curator for the exhibition “With Legs Wide Open – A Whore’s Ride Through History” at the Schwules Museum in Berlin in 2024. Rori takes us through the process of getting the exhibition off the ground. We also discuss the collaborative effort behind it, negotiating with art institutions, and the delicacies of interviewing sex workers and collecting stories from a legally and socially sensitive environment.
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Mentioned during the episode:
Objects of Desire: https://www.projectofdesire.co.uk/about/?language=english
Prostituiertenschutzgesetz: https://www.bmfsfj.de/bmfsfj/themen/gleichstellung/frauen-vor-gewalt-schuetzen/prostituiertenschutzgesetz
With Legs Wide Open, A Whore’s Ride Through History: https://www.schwulesmuseum.de/ausstellung/with-legs-wide-open-a-whores-ride-through-history/?lang=en
Red Light Tour, Schöneberg: https://www.schwulesmuseum.de/presseaktuell/a-stroll-with-sex-workers-through-schoeneberg/?lang=en // https://www.redlightwalkberlin.com/en
Gabriele (Gaby) Zürn: http://www.history-house.de/Seiten-de/de4.html
Anjali Anrondekar: https://anjaliarondekar.academia.edu/
Café Achteck (Berlin green toilets): https://withberlinlove.com/2017/11/13/cafe-achteck-berlins-green-pissoir/
Revolting Prostitutes, Molly Smith & Juno Mac: https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/book/revolting-prostitutes/
Hurenpass: https://www.fairjobbing.org/der-hurenpass-und-was-es-daruber-zu-wissen-gibt/
Radicalizing Care – Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating: https://www.delpireandco.com/produit/radicalizing-care-feminist-and-queer-activism-in-curating/
Prostitution Information Center, Amsterdam: https://pic-amsterdam.com/
Quilting The Revolution: A Whore’s Paradise in Fabric: https://www.schwulesmuseum.de/veranstaltung/flashmob-quilting-the-revolution-a-whores-paradise-in-fabric/
Episode Transcript:
Nanette Ashby
Welcome to the Gender and Diversity Podcast Culturally Curious, where arts and culture have never been more titillating with me you host, Nanette Ashby.
In this episode I am joined by Rori Dior, a Berlin-based sex worker, anthropologist, activist, and co-founder of the archive Objects Of Desire. We discuss the ins and outs of creating and maintaining an archive such as Objects of Desire and the importance of institutional collaboration. We also highlight the influence of political environments, and which spaces are held by sex workers within art and history. Within the context of the fight to legitimize sex work as work, the collective behind Objects of Desire has created and curated an archive of objects and more importantly the stories behind them. These objects were received as gifts or accumulated by sex workers themselves. This archive illustrates the diversity within the sex worker community, their work, and the variety of clients.
We also talk about Rori’s work as a curator for the exhibition “With Legs Wide Open – A Whore’s Ride Through History” at the Schwules Museum in Berlin in 2024. Rori takes us through the process of getting the exhibition off the ground. We also discuss the collaborative effort behind it, negotiating with art institutions, and the delicacies of interviewing sex workers and collecting stories from a legally and socially sensitive environment.
A transcript of our conversation with all information and links mentioned during the interview is available in the show notes over on our website raffia-magazine.com. We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode over on our Instagram page raffia_magazine. Don’t forget to leave a review! That said, make sure to strap in for our private whore’s ride through history.
Rori Dior
So my name is Rori. I’m a sex worker. I’ve been doing sex work for about 15 years in different areas of the industry, of the work. I’m also an anthropologist. So that was, those were sort of my studies. I’m a member of the Collective Objects of Desire, which…we’re a collective of sex workers, artists and anthropologists. The project is focused on changing narratives around sex work through archiving and art.
So I’ve been active with that collective since 2016. We did our first exhibition in London, at a small gallery that we had to like crowdfund from clients to pay for. And then we did an exhibition in 2019 at the Schwules Museum. And we’ve done little mini exhibitions elsewhere… in Mexico City, we had someone who we were working with who did, I think, 10 interviews with sex workers there and added to the archive. And, in 2024 did an exhibition along with another group on the history of sex work in Berlin and Germany.
Nanette Ashby
And I had the pleasure of seeing that exhibition. It was really fascinating. I especially remember the beauty spots in the first part of the exhibition. I thought that was so very cool. And also the big quilt. I forgot what the name was, but I will leave it in the description.
Rori Dior
I think it was the red light utopia quilt.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Rori Dior
This is so beautiful. It’s…I think…yeah, it’s the first piece of artwork we have in the exhibition and it’s two meters… I think it’s two meters by two meters big.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, it’s huge!
Rori Dior
And you can just look at it for hours because there’s so many different details. It’s based on the artist, Ernestine Pastorello, who’s also one of the curators, on her interviews with sex workers about their ideal working conditions. So there’s an imaginary brothel where the Huren Passen are burning, the prostitutes ID card that we all hate in Germany. And there’s free anonymous testing. And so it’s this vision of what ideal working conditions would look like sewn into fabric.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, it was amazing. I think I spent 15 minutes just looking at all the details.
Rori Dior
Oh, amazing.
Nanette Ashby
It was very impressive.
Rori Dior
Yeah.
Nanette Ashby
But let’s start from the beginning. So you mentioned that you’re part of the collective Objects Of Desire. Can you tell us more about what prompted the founding of that collective? What is it? How does it work?
Rori Dior
Sure. So I was studying in London, I was studying anthropology, and I was very interested in material culture anthropology and there’s all of these foundational texts to sort of Western anthropology about “the gift” and exchange. And so as I was kind of studying that, I was thinking about the dynamics of the social relations at work. So for example, if a client was giving me something and I was in my work persona, how did that gift kind of move into the rest of my life? And I was talking to other sex workers about this and it started, talking about gifts and all the kind of random crap that we got given… I think because in London, a lot of people work from home because brothels are illegal or they have an in-call flat. And working on the street is criminalized.
So often people are working in these domestic settings so a lot of the objects that you encounter in work are domestic objects. So I found that clients, because it would come to my house, would give me like a toaster or, I had one client give me a carbon monoxide detector. And then when I was talking, especially to non-sex workers, about these kind of gifts, I noticed that that was really surprising to people and it sort of spoke about how also the relationships at work were maybe different from what non-sex workers thought. Which spoke to these kinds of dynamics of care… Sometimes too much, just this sort of idea that like, you can’t take care of yourself, you know, you’re this like dumb hooker who’s going to burn your house down.
So initially, I think it just started from those conversations. I met another worker who was also an artist, and we were like “maybe we should just put all our stuff in and these stories in some gallery”. And then we devised this kind of method of doing interviews because often when we talk to people, we’d just say “tell me about an object that has significance in relation to your work”, people would say “oh I don’t have anything”. So we kind of devised this format where we would talk to people about like “can you describe a particular booking?”, “describe your last booking”, just different ways to get into kind of people’s experience at work and then these different objects would always come up. An example that I like to give, particular to London, is towels. Because if people are working from home, they’re doing a lot of laundry and so towels is a big thing at work. The size of the towel… if it’s too small, then it’s falling off like when the client comes back from the shower… if it’s too big, it takes forever to dry…so you kind of see how these objects tell a lot about the relations with clients.
Also like our own relation as workers to the labor, because there’s this kind of slogan that “sex work is work”, but the actual labor around maintaining that, especially as a society where we have so many conflicts and troubled ideas around the exchange of sex and intimacy for money… So how sex workers use material objects to kind of maintain those boundaries, which could also be putting all of your work stuff in one suitcase. So when your mom comes over, there’s nothing, there’s no object out of place. So I found that sex workers had this real awareness of physical objects.
And some of the other literature that I was reading of kind of anthropology at the time… There was this one ethnography, I think it was maybe by someone called Sophie Day, and it was talking about how…because a lot of the, like even the legislation in London, is around…or in England, is around this idea of public/private. So you can’t take this like private thing of sex into the public sphere of work. So if you do it alone at home, then that’s kind of legally…I mean, you’re probably breaking some law…but that’s how it’s sort of structured. And she was saying that by confusing these two dualisms, sex workers are somehow trapped and they never can really get out of this conflict that they’re in and amount…kind of just like, this fallen woman discourse. Through thinking through objects, I was like “wow, actually sex workers are really hyper attuned to these things” and are using them. Even with the money, I would notice that people sometimes would ask for it at the end, even though it’s get money upfront.
So even with something which is supposed to be this kind of flat object in a way, like money, it’s a big difference if someone’s kind of pulling crumpled five pound notes out of their pocket or paying with these crisp 50s that they just got from the machine.
So I was getting really into having all of these conversations and it was also a time where they were talking about bringing in the Nordic model in the UK. And I found that this focus on objects was also a really good way to tell stories around sex work that weren’t trying to say it’s this or that. Like the aim of the project isn’t to say that it’s empowering or exploitative, where a lot of conversations around it have that binary. And then as a sex worker, it’s really hard to talk about your own experiences. So the idea was to interject in these discussions to tell stories of sex work from our perspectives in a way that we could get across. And I found that to be powerful about it.
People have tried, but you can’t really argue that “this is something that someone used and this is a story about it”. So it’s quite a simple formulation.
Nanette Ashby
I think it’s fascinating how one object can have so many different connotations and stories attached to them. For example, we use money every day. But depending on the context, it has a big difference. And also in the Netherlands, for example, cash is not something that you see a lot anymore, so it usually then has a connotation with the homeless population or street music. And that’s the only time you actually have cash in your hand. And that also prevents you from being able to help out because you literally don’t have cash on you anymore. You can’t even pay the bus with cash.
Rori Dior
Wow.
Nanette Ashby
So it’s fascinating how an everyday object can have so many connotations and roles.
Out of these conversations, you mentioned that you started this in 2016 and you also mentioned the exhibition in London was the same year. So I assume that’s how it started.
Rori Dior
Yeah, that was kind of the start. And then the aim was to kind of grow this online archive that could be this sort of living resource that people can submit objects to and then to do exhibitions in places where there’s some kind of discussion around the law that it can also interject into. And in Germany, we came in, me and the person who I did it with in London, in…I think it was…I came…when did I come? In 2017, which is when the Prostuiertenschutzgesetz was going into effect. So at the time that we did the research there, for the 2019 exhibition, I think we did about a year of research and we interviewed 40 sex workers living and working in Berlin. And we were asking about the law and whether they would register… Many people said they wouldn’t because of privacy concerns and not trusting what was going to happen with this information. Some people didn’t have the necessary immigration papers to register anyway. And the people who did were talking about these very bureaucratic, very German experiences of going to the Ordnungsamt.
We even had like, in that exhibition…we had to shut it off because it was too annoying, but we had this corner that was sort of meant to be like an Amt, this amped kind of Amt decor. I think we even had like a ficus tree, which my German colleagues said was a very bureaucratic tree. And then we had some motion sensor that…because someone told the story of going to register, and then the person screamed out…and this was in the middle of people who were registering for all kinds of work, like taxi drivers, whatever, and just called out “one more for the prostitution law”, like “noch eine für die Prostituiertenschutzgesetz” in front of this whole room of people.
So we had that, but then it was too annoying so we had to turn it off. So it was a time when everything was very up in the air about the law, basically and people were confused. What do they have to do? And how is it going to…what did it mean? Yeah.
Nanette Ashby
So you started the online archive. I saw that it consists of images or sound files or video files, and then the story attached to it. And I was actually surprised by the diversity of objects, actually. And as you mentioned, like the everyday objects that you don’t usually would associate with sex work. I think one that caught my eye was the jiu jitsu…what’s it called?
Rori Dior
Oh yeah. Gi…is it a gi?
Nanette Ashby
Yes. Yeah, the jiu jitsu gi suit because I also do martial arts, so I also wear it on a regular basis, so I was surprised to see it in the collection.
But, logistically, where are the objects? I assume you don’t have all of them yourself because it’s an online archive and people send things in, but can you take us through what criteria you look for, for objects to be included in the archive and also the practicalities of it.
Rori Dior
Yeah, no, I mean, we have…we don’t…I have, in my basement in Berlin, I have…we have a few boxes with kind of a mini exhibition because we’ve been asked sometimes just to do that at different events or conferences and things like that. So we have a little um kind of mini thing that we can roll out. Some of the things…like if it’s wet wipes, we just tend to get as we do it… Yeah, we don’t have all of these things physically. After doing the exhibition in London, we gave things back to people.
Nanette Ashby
Ah okay.
Rori Dior
So it has happened that when we’ve done another exhibition, we’ve called and asked to borrow the thing again. So it’s more like people would loan us things and then take them back unless they want to donate something.
Some things, I think, have gone into the Schwules Museum archive now that we’ve worked with them. But many things, yeah, we just…we take the photo or they send us a photo. If it’s not for an exhibition, then it’s just photos and stories or sound and stories. But we don’t really have any criteria. I think it’s more…I think if we’re not doing the interviews, people don’t tend to think of these everyday things as significant. Just that it’s someone who has experience as a sex worker, it could be about their relationships outside of work. Usually a story somehow relating to the work, but some of them don’t have long stories explaining what they are. And I kind of find that interesting too, if there’s just a bit of mystery around the object. I think there’s a raincoat from the Berlin exhibition which maybe just a client left and then just never came and picked back up because some things you just leave. The client was in a relationship and…not so much detail about it…And then other objects have very detailed stories like that.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, it was actually one of my questions was: what’s one of your favorite objects in the archive? What’s most memorable to you?
Rori Dior
Pops into my head because I’m in the States, but there’s…from the interviews that a sex worker in Mexico City did for this project. There’s a water bottle that someone who works on webcam in Tijuana uses and I think that story is really interesting because it speaks also a lot about borders…that they get sort of like cheap goods…and also then that she’s living with her family. I think her mom bought her the water bottle and she’s working in her room and maybe her family knows what she does but they don’t ask her directly and the water bottle kind of allows her to stay in there for a while and she doesn’t have to keep leaving the room. So yeah I thought that was kind of the interesting story around that.
Nanette Ashby
I’m just thinking about the interviews themselves. Are there specific questions for the interviews or is it kind of an open-ended conversation, or are there questions that you ask every person specifically?
Rori Dior
I think there’s questions. I think sometimes we just see how it goes. We did for the Berlin exhibition because it’s…especially because it’s in an area of Berlin, which is the area for street-based sex work on Kurfürstenstrasse. We wanted to include objects from street-based sex workers, which is also more difficult. Because often, people also didn’t speak English or German. I think we had Hungarian and Bulgarian translators with us. We also paid for interviews, which is really important to us as a point of access…that people could afford to give us half an hour or an hour of their time.
And so it would kind of change depending. I think sometimes when I did those interviews, people were like, “why do you want to know, like, about what I wear?” Sometimes you’re like, “okay no, this sounds odd”.
So I guess you just kind of have it as a conversation and then have points that you go back to that might be more relevant because maybe somebody just works online or often people like working in BD…dominatrixes would have more kit and more tools that they might take with them, so that might be a bigger thing.
We found that bags was a big thing for everyone. Because especially if you’re going out to see people like, you know, if yeah…if you’re dominatrix, if you have this big duffel bag…or maybe you have this tiny bag with just condoms and lube and pepper spray.
We also, in the curation of the exhibition, especially the second time when we had more resources and had done more interviews, we really thought about kind of letting the objects speak for themselves. And so we did all of the interviews and then we had this day where we put post-its up of different things and then tried to see, like, what emerged. So we tried to have it be kind of led by the objects rather than deciding the narrative and it…and it kind of came from there.
Nanette Ashby
Can you tell me a little bit more about the second exhibition? The one that was in 2024, which was called With Legs Wide Open, a Whore’s Ride Through History. How did that exhibition come about? You already mentioned there was a collaboration beforehand, so I assume the communication was already there. But how do exhibitions like that, especially since it was led by a sex worker collective, how do corporations like that come about? Is it just someone over to you and says, “oh, I have this idea”, or how does it work behind the scenes?
Rori Dior
I mean, the Schwules Museum has been really amazing in collaborating with them. In 2019, when we had come to Berlin, and then, through sex work networks, I got in touch with two other sex workers so then we were four in Objects Of Desire. We got funding from Open Society, which we applied for, and then went to the Schwules Museum as like, “we’re going to have to pitch this to them” about why sex work is a queer issue. And so we were all ready with all our like talking points. And then the director who met us just said “we’ve been waiting for you. You know, we’ve been wanting to do this kind of project and waiting for, you know, you to come to us”.
And they really see it as like, in creating this queer archive in the 1980s, we’re kind of in the same position that we are now, where queer historians or, you know, queer academics writing about queer experience, were not taken seriously.
So they also have been very, like, allowing, you know, anything we…any crazy idea we have, they’re like “you know how to tell your story, we’ll do our best to support you and make it happen”.
That was our first collaboration with them. And then another group of sex workers did these Red Light tours, which also happened as part of the exhibition. But they were doing that before with the Schwules Museum. So these were tours of the Schöneberg area, talking about how sex work has been going on there definitely since the mid 19th century, with the opening of the Bülowstrasse station and then they…so the first part of that was the tour, and then the museum along with them applied for this grant to do a second part, which is an exhibition. So that group also knew that we had worked with the Schwules Museum before and then we sort of joined forces to do this second exhibition.
Nanette Ashby
And what were the first meetings like?
Rori Dior
Well, first it was me and somebody else doing the research. It was, to be honest, it was just such a crazy timeline because we had a year…I think we had like May till September to do this research. And working also with these archives in Germany was difficult, especially the concentration camp archives, because we knew that sex workers had been persecuted as “Asozial” and sometimes under other labels and I would write to them and they would be like, “yeah we don’t have that”. Like, I have this other source that says that these…you know, “this person was there”, for example.
And some other…it’s also, I think, another really cool part of the project has been developing this network of kind of friendly academics and people who have also done this research.
Gaby (Gabriele) Zürn is a German academic who did a lot of research in Hamburg. So also getting their feedback, you know, you just have to keep trying and kind of having also the museum right for us sometimes really helped.
It was just really intense because we had such a big volume of work and also kept finding things. I think one thing, for me, was that I really tried to approach it from the beginning, not from this perspective of loss…
There’s an anthropologist called Anjali Arondekar who gave a talk at the Schwules Museum just before we started research about…she does her research in these archives in Goa around like sexuality and…it would be a long tangent, but talks about this idea of abundance and kind of trying to not focus on this paradigm of loss that we often have, that like “so much has been destroyed, we can’t get to these stories”, but to try to think about how it’s really everywhere…like this mouche thing that you mentioned, or even just clothes… Like we have historical reproductions, so thinking about the clothes people would have worn at the time and what that meant for doing sex work. So, for example, the curator who’s sewed a lot of the costumes, Ernestine, she talks about how you would really be like held at the waist then, but but women didn’t really, in Europe wear…cover their crotch until the 1920s, except for maybe during their period, they would have a pad that they slot in.
So the kind of physicality of being in the street and working in the street would have meant you know, having all of this kind of…the corset and everything around and maybe like showing the boobs or picking up the skirt… But it would take…I think she said like 15 minutes to get everything off and longer to put it on. So the work of sex work wouldn’t have been getting naked, it might have…it would have involved all of these different things. So I think just even seeing things like that as we started to research more, it just became like, “wow, there’s so much stuff!” Whereas we could have…we sort of started like, “how do we get to this kind of thing?” Yeah.
Nanette Ashby
I’m mentally walking through the exhibition right now. I was actually very surprised about the part about the concentration camps and the Nazi era. And there was one art object, which was just a triangle of sand, which was like a type of monument that wasn’t there, like a sort of counter monument. And that was one of my favorites that left a really lasting imprint in my mind. Especially…I’m German, so I grew up with the history at school and going to concentration camps as field trips and stuff like that. But the topic of sex work had never, ever come up at all. So it’s also fascinating that there’s so many different versions of history. And depending on what lens you have or what focus you have, you’re going to find different things. That was quite moving.
Rori Dior
That was something we also talked a lot about was having this felt element of looking into sex work history and certain things that you kind of, as a sex worker, might pick up on that that somebody who doesn’t have that experience won’t.
Wanting to have this kind of, you know, historic rigor and how we look at sources and everything like this, but also allow for these emotional kind of felt connections of… which I think applies to queer history in general as well.
When you read “this couple were roommates”…and then as a queer person, you’re like, “hmm”. So kind of allowing, yeah, allowing for this same kind of, yeah, felt interaction with the past based on how we’re experiencing things today was important to us.
The section on witches, I think, is one where we allow that in more, even though we’re saying that this is all speculative, we…nobody really knows.
Nanette Ashby
You were focusing on the research of the exhibition. When you go about creating an exhibition, how do you approach the research? Because in my mind, if I would do it, I would be quite overwhelmed if I just went in without a specific goal or without a research question or a specific focal point because then I would want to include everything and find everything and get lost.
Did you have like a specific research question? You mentioned you put the post-it notes on the wall and then kind of found a narrative within the research?
Rori Dior
I think we didn’t, which like we probably should have, because that’s kind of exactly what happened and things kept coming in. And I think because we felt, okay, “we have this platform to do this now”. So the amount of like work that…and how insane it was, how intense it was… I think we could have, if we did it again, we probably would try to have that kind of more structured… But none of us really had that experience either. Like we’d done this sort of Objects of Desire in a very contained format. And then coming at this historical exhibition…in my background more in anthropology… So I was like terrified when I was doing the writing that I was just writing like a massive PhD. And I was like, “fuck, you know, like, that’s how I’m doing it!” Because that’s sort of what the way I would go. So I definitely think, if we did it again, I would want to like whittle it down. I think it’s too much. I think we ended up with too much, even though it’s great and it’s colorful and you know, I love it. I love what we ended up with. And maybe that’s how…that’s sort of how it had to be. We were joking that we had this kind of fictitious idea of this museum of sex work…
Nanette Ashby
Yes! I read about this.
Rori Dior
But then I was like, “we actually did make a museum”. Because it’s just… it’s so dense.
A lot of people said they had to go twice. I tried to communicate more of the information also in different ways, but it was just a question of time and getting it all done.
Nanette Ashby
Could you actually explain that a little bit more to me? Because I saw that after I went to the exhibition, and I’ve been reading the descriptions of the exhibition. There were different departments and different parts within the building of the Schwules Museum, but they were then reconfigured to make the building a whole Museum of Sex, not just a temporary exhibition within a museum.
Rori Dior
Well I definitely…when we did the research, I didn’t want to do a chronological exhibition. I also wanted to kind of think about different ideas of time and, especially if it was this history of regulation, it’s very cyclical in Germany. So you have these periods…like even in the Middle Ages, where it’s regulated, legal, but regulated, and you can kind of…you can be this sort of like professionalized in a way, but at the expense of surveillance and control, and not everyone can access it, just like today.
And then you have these periods like 1933, where then, the fact that everyone’s registered is like then…provides this really easy way to know who is “deviant”.
And you’ve always had these like “in the middle” ages. I think it was like offene Frauen were the women who worked with the registered brothels and then heimliche Frauen were the women working covertly.
So we didn’t want to do this chronological exhibition because…I don’t know, it was too circular as well, and so we thought more along the lines of themes. And then I read about this…I think it was this…when, in East Germany, there was this like…very soon after the Second World War, I think. Or no, sorry, very soon after the establishment of the East German state, they wanted to make this museum. And it was all very haphazard and they were writing to different places for artifacts, and that kind of interested me as this sort of…putting together this speculative museum.
It’s sort of meant to be this museum, this imagination of like, “if we had a museum, what would it be?” And not just in the outward facing bit, but in terms of like…I think of the Natural History Museum in Berlin, they have this where you can see how…you can go and see how they’re cataloging, for example. So all of that process…so like the kind of bureaucratic, institutional side of the museum as well, it’s sort of playing with this idea of whores being an institution. And we have the Office for the Reclamation of Public Space, which is…the idea is that it’s in one of these classic Berlin toilets, the Cafe Achteck, 19th century, green toilets, that…there’s still some in Berlin. So it’s kind of a playful way of thinking about it, I guess.
Nanette Ashby
What kind of challenges did you face? Are there specific things where you’re like, “okay, next time, that might be different”? Or, because it was such a collaborative effort and the museum was pro the exhibition, weren’t there any challenges because it was…both parties really wanted this exhibition and maybe in other situations there are challenges?
Rori Dior
Yeah, sure! I think the museum…I mean the museum was just very supportive. So I wouldn’t say there was…I think…I’m sure it must have been difficult for them. We were very, you know, late on things and I think working among sex workers can be difficult. We all have very different schedules and work comes up. The nature of the work is that it’s…is that it kind of, you know, you sometimes you get a job and you need to take it because you need to pay your rent and it’s when you have another meeting. And so that working around that can always be tricky. And we definitely came from different kind of backgrounds. I had worked with…I had worked with everybody but one person before. So bridging some of that, especially the idea ideas around like the tone of how…the tone of the writing should be. But I think we all kind of learned and grew from it a lot, but there was definitely…there was definitely conflicts around it for sure. For me, I’m always very concerned that everything has to just hold up so much, because it’s going to be scrutinized from every angle. And also, I think there’s so many discursive traps when writing about sex work that you can fall into, which we didn’t have to worry about so much when we did an object-based exhibition because it’s people’s words and stories. But having this…talking about history in this way when, like I said before, you have this binary of empowered versus kind of exploited, and so you have to be kind of careful about…yeah, about who you’re excluding when you’re writing about sex work history and who you’re speaking for and all of this.
So for me, the writing was just really this kind of like, constant whittling away and checking and double checking. And I know for some people, that was like, very irritating, I was very annoying.
Nanette Ashby
But yeah, I get it. Because I’m going to also be writing about sex work, I recently read the Revolting Prostitutes book about the different legal structures. And wow.
Rori Dior
Oh, it’s so good. Yeah.
Nanette Ashby
I realized I was quite naive to think that feminism meant “pro sex work”, but that is so not the case, apparently.
Rori Dior
No, definitely not.
Nanette Ashby
That is definitely going to be a challenge. I’m not sure there is a neutral way to talk about it, because if you do too neutral, it can sound like you’re for it, but also what would be the problem with being for it? But it’s also, again, an academic, quite traditional field…or museums in general are also quite traditional still. So yeah, I’m not sure there is a balance, or did you find it?
Rori Dior
For me, I would kind of approach it as whether it’s about history or the legal situation today of sort of “sex work is happening”. And I think in Revolting Prostitutes, they make this point very well, you know, “how can we make people safer as they are working?” And also that it is this intersectional issue, with race, with class, migration. So I think kind of treat…because I think if you are just like, “no, sex work is great”, that can also be really exclusionary to people who are doing sex work and hate it. And nobody should have to do sex work. Nobody should have to do any job that they don’t want to do. Yeah, sex work activism has also gone through all of these different approaches.
I love Revolting Prostitutes for kind of being able to hold a lot of that complexity. And I think there…I think it’s the Chapter 3, which is about trafficking and migration, is so brilliant. And I understand why a lot of sex workers would want to also just be like, “it’s completely…it’s different!” It’s like sex work versus trafficking, but then they’re, them, addressing it in this nuanced way, which is talking about how they are connected and how actually sex workers are best positioned often to…to kind of work on things vis-a-vis trafficking. So I think…yeah, I really like their approach.
I think we were very lucky with the Schwules Museum, and I think they are a community organization who is really committed already to this “nothing about us without us”… But I do think that that’s very unique.
Nanette Ashby
Oh, yeah.
Rori Dior
Not always, but I do see other depictions of sex work in in larger museums. And I think often there’s this kind of idea that, like, “we’ll talk to sex workers”, “we’ll consult with sex workers”, but ultimately, like, “we’re going to do the curation” or “we’ll have…like…quote…professional artists making work, but in conversation with sex workers”.
So I think that’s something that happens quite a lot. And I can’t speak for how it works in different areas and I don’t think that only sex workers can make art about sex work, but I definitely think they should be prioritized a lot more. And not just not just in this way of consulting, which I think happens a lot.
Our experience is very unique and yeah, even when we have been in discussions about doing it elsewhere, I think…which I would love to do…but I think it would be different working with a bigger institution. I think you come up against more…they have their way of doing things. As, kind of, outsiders, you’re going to have to probably, like, fight quite a bit for your voice to be heard. And my worst fear would be to produce something that was, like…went off-piste of what I would want to show, especially because it’s something that doesn’t get a lot of air time. I mean, it’s getting more now, but yeah.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah… That reminds me, I’ve been reading a lot about curation, but especially queer curation because there isn’t much on sex work and curation actually written so I’m trying to find the intersections through queer curation and it’s the same. A lot of times it’s like consultants… There will be temporary exhibitions which…there’s also discussion how effective are temporary exhibitions if the objects aren’t actually going to go into the collections and are not going to be part of the permanent collections.
But also apparently, especially bigger museums who rely on public funding and also the political climate…it’s a risk to affiliate themselves with these subjects. And I would assume that sex work might be even harder than the queer community, depending.
Especially with temporary exhibitions, you have to be there. You have to know about it in time and you have to be able to come. And if there aren’t catalogues to commemorate it, it’s…
Rori Dior
Yeah, yeah, I’m happy we like…the pace of work was so insane. And the last…when we were doing the catalog, it was just, like, doing nothing else. But I’m happy that we did that and have… To have it, it feels really good to have it for the opening.
Nanette Ashby
So, roughly from the beginning of conversations to have the exhibition till the opening, how much time was between the two?
Rori Dior
It was less than a year, so it was like…I think we started…maybe we had conversations in April. The other person who’d done the Red Light History Walk, she knew longer, but we really started the research in May, and then the exhibition opened, I think, at the end of March.
Nanette Ashby
Because it was quite a big exhibition. There was the front room and then there was the back area and then there was a second part down the corridor with the big bed as well and the… how was it? It reminded me of a greenhouse.
Rori Dior
Yeah. It’s the chapel. Yeah.
Nanette Ashby
The chapel, yes! And I also really loved the interviews with the magazine, in the last part, those were really cool. I really liked the diversity in objects. It was really entertaining and…maybe “entertaining” is not the right word, but you didn’t get bored. There was a lot of diversity in objects. And I also remember the video about the bureaucracy, which was amazing. Which was filmed in the archive downstairs, right?
Rori Dior
Yeah and we actually had that character in the 2019 exhibition, this kind of bureaucrat witch character, and she was talking about the Hurenpass. And so we were like, “okay, we’ll bring her back and and have her talk about history”. It was also a way of telling this kind of more boring history of regulation in a fun way. No, that was really fun to make. And I hope if we do, it…I really love making the videos. So I would love to do it again and have a chance to also put some of the information…especially around like the legal stuff…into a video format. I think…not, I don’t like exhibitions that are like too much video, but to have like one or two more, I think would be cool.
Yeah, then we also had…because it was initially in that space where the film was playing in the middle…they had the June 2nd, the Leon…kind of when you come around and there’s like a big screen…and that was supposed to be this artwork that was commissioned for the exhibition filmed at the Pergamon about Ishtar… And there was also going to be a piece when you walk in, with Ishtar as this museum docent who’s going to guide you through.
But then that…because of the strike for Palestine, then those works were kind of pulled like a week before.
So that was also very last minute to find what to put there. And it…spatially, because it was going to be this three channel thing. So then that was just very last minute, kind of, adjusting to all of that.
So just because you mentioned challenges…last minute things were also happening. Yeah.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, that reminds me actually, even exhibitions like this have to adapt to the political climate around. And for example, in Amsterdam, there used to be a yearly big feminist protest for International Women’s Day every year. And last year, sadly, it was deemed too dangerous because…I think, in the same week, the president of Israel came to the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam…and because of police violence, it was canceled. And sadly, the whole organization shut down days after. So there hasn’t been a protest anymore. But it’s quite fascinating how you need to adapt to what’s going on around.
Rori Dior
Yeah. And I know from the…because it was a negotiation of what…we wanted to say that these works weren’t there because of the strike for Palestine and the artists had wanted to say, so we really wanted to kind of honor that in the exhibition, but…which we had…we had assigned talking about it, but it was also this negotiation with the museum. And I know the museum itself was split around…they weren’t unanimous on how they should approach it as an institution, and it’s just…all of that in Germany over the past year was very intense.
Nanette Ashby
Oh, yeah, definitely.
So what advice would you have to museums that would like to make similar exhibitions or work on collaborative projects like this? Are there any things that you’re like, “you really need to pay attention to these things”, or advice, or things not to do?
Rori Dior
I mean, I think like, yeah, starting just really listening and not…I guess it’s difficult because institutions have like their ingrained way of doing things, but to be kind of open to have a negotiation and then I think to have things maybe really…which with the Schwules Museum was fine, but I know if we were to do it again, maybe on a bigger scale, we would want to have kind of agreements going in that we would have the right to veto things… Because there are things that if you don’t have experience as a sex worker, you are going to get wrong.
I mean, that sex workers can also get wrong, of course, as well, or, you know, I mean…what is wrong…but it’s very important to listen, and I think to give some space, if you are this big institution, I would say that just communicating and asking and listening is not enough because there are so many sex workers with experience as artists or filmmakers and all of these things. And so I think to have it to really have it in your ethos of giving space, not just kind of using the…like the coolness that comes along with it…I think is important. And then I think to listen…around questions of anonymity… I know that’s something…
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, that’s what I was wondering about as well, yeah.
Rori Dior
It’s probably different for different collectives, but we also like to, for example, leave it ambiguous whether we all have this experience or not. That also leaves it ambiguous for maybe people that we’re working with that don’t have to out themselves because that’s also, I think, a privilege to be able to do that, that not everyone can if you have kids or depending on your migration status or whatever it is.
I think to kind of ask the people that you’re working with about how to approach that, about how to leave also this, you know, gray area if necessary for people to be able to participate who maybe aren’t out. Yeah, I think that would be what I would say.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah I’m thinking of projects with queer and trans organizations and museums… One of the things I noticed was…I was also reading a book called Radicalizing Care: Feminist Curation. I found it in the library at the Schwules Museum, and I think one of the board members of the Schwules Museum also co-wrote it. It made the point that a lot of curation and care relies on informal and unpaid labor. I was also wondering about that because in other projects that I read about…in Dutch we have like a word called “ervaringsexpert”, like a…what’s it called…like an expert for your experience. In those projects, there was no funding to pay them for their labor. And if they had been paid, the exhibitions wouldn’t have been able to go through. And that’s also something, as, hopefully, a future curator myself, I’m quite worried about as well… As, if we want to put the time and energy into more marginalized communities, that will also mean, likely, that we have to rely on less money or no money. And I was wondering how that worked.
Rori Dior
I mean, we had a project manager who was great, who was really supportive. Someone from the museum did a mediation for us at one point when we had conflict within the group that we thought it would be helpful to have somebody to kind of structure that conversation and that worked really well.
Which I feel they…I feel the Schwules Museum also just, like, went above and beyond to support us. But yeah, it’s still…I mean even just the intensity of the work and how much we were paid wasn’t really…you know, we would be supporting ourselves also through doing sex work or whatever, or some people had other jobs. So I think that is also an accessibility issue of, of like, “can you afford to kind of throw yourself into this DIY project?”. And then I know even from talking to other museums, it’s still not really like for the amount of work, like, a salary that you could live on.
So… And that already limits who can do it. And we had some…there was an artist who we wanted to make something for this exhibition who just said, “yeah, for the amount of money and like, I know what kind of project this is, and I don’t want to make your lives so, you know, difficult because I know I won’t be able to do that given everything”. So yeah, which sucks!
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, definitely. It also goes not just for museums, but also magazines or publishing things or creative collectives and feminist spaces. It’s quite tough, because usually the projects that are most needed or most interesting, or rely on a lot of passion, it’s very hard to find funding for them. Sustainable funding as well… Because that’s something I was wondering about the archive itself, because a lot of times, especially online archives, you need continuity and longevity so the archives live on. From my experience as a magazine, you also need money to keep the basics alive.
Rori Dior
Oh, yeah, with…earlier this year, I was like, “fuck, all my emails, like…have been bouncing back for a month because nobody’s paid this PayPal thing for the server and domain and like, who knows where it is”, and…chaotic. I don’t know, I guess we just manage and it’s still…it’s still up.
Nanette Ashby
Why is this work important to you?
Rori Dior
I mean, I guess it’s just always felt really immediate. Like the Objects Of Desire stuff felt really immediate. It felt like it was really immediately related just to being able to speak. As I was kind of saying earlier, just to be able to tell a story about work that didn’t mean…if it’s a good story, doesn’t mean I love my work all the time and if it’s a bad story that I…you know…want to be rescued or sex work is terrible. So it was really this kind of feeling that I think a lot of sex workers would relate to…of just finding the discourse to be so overpowering that it’s difficult to even just…even to yourself, process experiences. A big part of it, for me, is also the community building of doing this kind of work together.
As we were talking about earlier with funding, a lot of it’s produced through favors. And we also make sure everyone gets paid somehow. And I think sex workers are pretty conscientious about that, because we also know what it’s like to be asked to do free work a lot… But it’s still kind of favors and people, you know, that we know and, there’s a lot of that community aspect towards doing it. So, that element of doing something together, I think really builds connections in the movement. That’s also, I think really important to me.
So yeah, I mean, on a personal level, I guess processing my own experiences and then on a broader level connecting with other sex workers and building, like…the sex worker in Mexico who we met through the project who wrote…we were in touch with and then got more in touch with sex work community there.
With the past that…the doing this history exhibition has been really powerful because, often, in particular, meeting older sex workers who’ve worked during the 1980s was incredible. And then also just thinking about these experiences of sex workers in the past…people that we know or that we don’t know. And thinking about it as all of our history and a part of our history. And I think that’s been really emotional and really powerful to me now, to kind of process that more.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, it reminds me, I was in Amsterdam, in the Red Light District. There’s a Prostitution Information Center there and I interviewed one of the sex workers there and the history of the place as well, that…the fact that this small, very creative place…with lots of events and, you know…it’s a community building space in the heart of Amsterdam. That it exists is based on one woman who put in the effort and wanted to create a network and community to support each other. And that is still standing. It’s quite impressive.
Rori Dior
That’s so cool.
Nanette Ashby
The big question is why should it be important for museums and archives to include sex workers history and experience and culture? One of my specialties is the inclusion of disability representation. That’s actually how I found the Gay Museum, or the Schwules Museum in Berlin, because, a few years ago, they did an exhibition on disability and sex, and that was like, did my two specialties intersecting. And that was really fascinating, but with every minority group, why should it be important for museums and archives?
Rori Dior
I guess it’s just like one lens of looking through stuff. That’s kind of how I felt with the history exhibition now. What we wanted to show was, you know, these definitions of who is a whore is often a social definition of who is on the outside. And so it’s intersectional with feminist history, with history of disability, with all of these things. And so I think it’s seeing this history through this other lens that is not often looked at. So it can tell us a lot… kind of just shift the perspective, I guess, on how we’re viewing history. I think just the fact that these things happened is also important and needs to be talked about, but it’s for the same reason…I’ve been thinking a lot…I was doing these walking tours in London…I was in London for a few months before I came away here…and it was, like, working class…focused on working class history. So not on kings or big names or whatever, and just how how people were living and in these different areas of London and a lot of a lot of sex work comes into that.
So I would also like to see it not just as sex work history, but as interlocking with these other things. And I just think it’s just not talked about enough. So it gives us kind of fresh perspectives that are really important.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, and I guess also sex is part of everyone’s everyday life. So it’s quite strange that sex work would not be included in that as part of the fabric of our society.
Rori Dior
And it’s something that is also, like, capitalized on a lot now. It is a big topic. People are wanting to talk about it. People have always wanted to talk about it. That’s why, with this whole thing around art, it’s like sex workers have…it’s such a cliche to have, you know, sex worker muses and…the artist who made the chapel, she always says that like, “Jesus turning the other cheek, like, who do you think he got that from?” as this way of…sex workers have kind of been behind so, so much.
Nanette Ashby
I’m mentally still standing in the exhibition and the connection that the bed as an object seems to be a common idea because the Prostitution Information Centre in Amsterdam also functioned as an archive/mini museum at one point and they also had a bed. So it’s quite interesting.
Recently, as part of the research I’m doing, I went to the prostitution museum in Amsterdam. And that was actually quite fascinating because it was in a house. So it was like you were walking through someone’s office and they had it built up as if you’re walking into someone’s house and there were lockers and things spilling out of the lockers. And since it was an old Dutch building, everything was very crammed. I really liked the immersion of it because the bed was standing next to, like, the common objects sex workers would use in their daily work. I love the idea of adding a bed. It seems also quite taboo to put a bed into an institution of knowledge.
Rori Dior
No, it was…I loved it. Also because of budget and everything we did, we had such big ideas for, like, all of the scenography. So we wanted that to be all so much more like bordello and the…Ginger Angelica, the artist who did the chapel and did the…a lot of the scenography, she was like, “well, if it’s like an exhibition by whores, we have to be like hustling the public whenever we can”. So she had this whole, like, drawn up idea to buy this vibrating metal plate, like to put under the bed, and then also this slot coin/slot machine, so you would like link it. So then you could, like, put a coin in and the bed would vibrate, which, like…that was one of the things that the museum was like, “yeah, sure!” and then just didn’t happen because it was too…beyond. But so there was also that idea of hustling and that was supposed to be vibrating.
But I think it was still great. And we had so many like…I loved giving…we would give talks in the exhibition…I loved giving the talks on the bed. Even stuff like, people had clients come in…not to…couldn’t have sex in the exhibition, but like to see it or something. And then there was, like, funny interactions that happened there. And it was also nice to see it as this, like, living space that sex workers were using and kind of, you know, people would take naps on it. Like the museum staff said that they loved it because, on Tuesday when the museum’s closed, people would just lie there. Like it was really cool.
And somebody took it, by the way! It’s at someone’s house. She, like, got rid of her sofa so that she could have this bed in her living room. So I’ve seen…I haven’t been there, but I’ve seen the picture. So it lives on.
Nanette Ashby
Amazing! I really like the idea that the archive is also fluid. Your archive…that it goes and lives on in every day and it’s not put away somewhere and then when you need it, you kind of pull it back in and temporarily recollect it.I think that’s a really cool idea.
Rori Dior
I think it’s also important to us, which I didn’t…I don’t think I mentioned before that we do, you know, we do shift details. So, for example, like, if it’s a bracelet and the…but the person doesn’t…says like, “oh, can you change something to make it less recognizable?” Maybe it’s a necklace. So some of the things might be the real thing or they might not be. And this idea that, kind of, we are in charge of telling our own stories, because I think there is this kind of voyeuristic…wanting to know who are the sex workers and…There’s all of this stuff around it. So to, kind of like, fuck with people a bit and we’re still you know presenting these stories, but that we can have a bit of, like, playfulness in how we do it and to change details or change things. It’s not a cataloged object. It’s not the same condom, for instance, that like…whatever. And some of the things, then, it’s also really fun…there’s these processes behind, like, making them. So like for the meth pipe…there’s these stories around meth, and like none of us smoked meth, so we had to go get a pipe, and then, like, we were burning, I think, sugar. We were like burning different things, so it would have the look of a used meth pipe. And then I think there was another story about Derrida and chocolate, and so we like dipped this Derrida book into chocolate, and I have the video of like doing this Derrida fondue…
So some of the things, like, it’s also this making of these objects that was fun. Yeah.
Nanette Ashby
Aw, that sounds really fun! That sounds very cool. The last question that we ask everybody is, what are you still curious about?
Rori Dior
Well, I would just love to continue this historical research. So I think especially the section on colonialism, we didn’t have time to either fully look into colonial archives in Berlin, which haven’t been digitized, or talk with sex workers from former colonies. And so I think I would be really curious to go further into that research and then also something, which I think just because of time, didn’t come into enough, which we touch on, is HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and I think I would be curious also to talk to more sex workers with experience working then and how it was and particularly these links between the gay movement in Germany and the sex worker movement. Because this was a time when they were, like, throwing balls and like…someone told us there was these, like, gay versus whores football matches, because the whores kind of got kicked out of the feminist movement and so the gays were like…
So particular stories of different squats and buildings in the 80s. And I think I’m curious to hear more about that.
Nanette Ashby
Amazing! I’m all out of questions, although I’m still very curious about so many stories. But…I’m really glad I managed to see the exhibition. Thank you so much, it was a pleasure meeting you!
You can find more information and links to everything we talked about in this episode in the show notes over at raffia-magazine.com, and please let us know what you think over on Instagram @raffia_magazine. If you like this podcast, why don’t you leave us a lovely review on Spotify?
Thanks so much for listening and all your support for the podcast. I’ll catch you in the next episode! Bye!
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