TEMA
Single-channel video with sound, 4K, colour, 13 min
2025
A magazine survives in fragments. A generation survives through memory.
TEMA begins from an incomplete archive. The film follows older gay men who found one another in Baku’s parks between the late 1980s and early 2000s, when these sites offered encounter, recognition and community. Many left Azerbaijan, while the places they once inhabited remained undocumented. The film takes its title from TEMA, a magazine that circulated across late Soviet and early post-Soviet contexts. Of thirteen known issues, six have been recovered. These pages are brought into contact with testimonies, cinematic references and images of Samad Vurgun, Ganjlik and Narimanov parks. What appears is not a historical record, but a constellation of voices, fragments, remembered gestures and landscapes whose meanings have changed.
Performed by Emile Wendt, TEMA considers how histories survive when discretion formed part of everyday life. Memory becomes something carried and shared through bodies, language and place. It asks what can be preserved when institutional archives are absent, and how a community may recognise its past through traces that were never intended to become documents.
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Single-channel video with sound, 4K, colour, 13 min
2025
A magazine survives in fragments. A generation survives through memory.
TEMA begins from an incomplete archive. The film follows older gay men who found one another in Baku’s parks between the late 1980s and early 2000s, when these sites offered encounter, recognition and community. Many left Azerbaijan, while the places they once inhabited remained undocumented. The film takes its title from TEMA, a magazine that circulated across late Soviet and early post-Soviet contexts. Of thirteen known issues, six have been recovered. These pages are brought into contact with testimonies, cinematic references and images of Samad Vurgun, Ganjlik and Narimanov parks. What appears is not a historical record, but a constellation of voices, fragments, remembered gestures and landscapes whose meanings have changed.
Performed by Emile Wendt, TEMA considers how histories survive when discretion formed part of everyday life. Memory becomes something carried and shared through bodies, language and place. It asks what can be preserved when institutional archives are absent, and how a community may recognise its past through traces that were never intended to become documents.
