CURA.

With her debut chapbook, award-winning author and curator Legacy Russell returns to poetry with her GAY POMPEII, a collection of lyric poems that begin at the end of the world. Rising out of Russell’s 2022-2023 Digital Fellowship for Pompeii Commitment.Archaeological Matters, the first long-term, contemporary art programme established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the author and curator explores ash, filth, dirt, and decay, intersectional with the fetishistic mythos of Pompeii and its destruction in 79 CE by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that receives over two million visitors per year to view its archeological excavation. Russell puts the mass voyeurism, sensation, extraction, and loss of Pompeii—a devastating moment frozen in time—to work. In GAY POMPEII, the site becomes a device with which Russell unspools birth, death, genocide, visual culture, and space-time. The title of this compilation underscores the essence and demand of capitalism: to be carefree in the face of looming extinction.  Russell’s GAY POMPEII is a selfie taken at the edge of catastrophe and a polyphonic elegy.

About LEGACY RUSSELL

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2022-23 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow, a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and a 2024-25 Lunder Institute for American Art Fellow. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. Her first book is Glitch Feminism (2020, Verso Books); her second book is BLACK MEME (2024, Verso Books).

About GenderFail

GenderFail (founded in 2015) is a publishing, programming, and archiving platform run solely by Be Oakley. GenderFail is not non-profit but profit-for-survival or profit-to-continue-our-work-without-other-means-of-capital and, most importantly, to make money for others I publish, to create profit-for-labor. With GenderFail, publishing is personal; it’s a tool for disseminating imperfect but powerful ideas. 

With GenderFail, the project has published work by numerous artists, including E. Jane, Lex Brown, Alok Vaid-Menon, American Artist, Demian Dineyazhi, Paul Paul Soulellis A.L. Stiener, Eileen Myles, Pamela Sneed and many others. GenderFail has exhibited at MoMA PS1 (Past and Future Fictions, 2018), The International Center of Photography (Queering the Collection, 2018), Center for Book Arts (Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice 2021), Woman Studio Workshop (Seize Control of the FDA 2022), Sprengel Museum Hannover (The Shelf- Artistic Publishing Platform), Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (An Incessant Unknowability: An Archive of Protest Inspired Typography and It’s Open Source Uses 2024-25).GenderFail is the reception of a 2022-2025 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Grant.

About Pompeii Commitment 


Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters is the first long-term contemporary art programme, established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Starting from December 2020, and launching a new programme since July 2022, Pompeii Commitment reconfigures the archaeological site of Pompeii as a foundation for alternative forms of knowledge, forming through a multiplicity of functions: artistic and curatorial research in situ and remotely (Digital Fellowships), digital artists’ contributions (Commitments), collection of testimonies (Fabulae) and documents (Historiae), indefinite collection (Collectio), hypothetical and transdisciplinary museum (Inventario), library in formation (Library of Archeology and Futurology). All these possible departments are dedicated to studying and sharing the multiple cognitive potentials of Pompeii and the episteme of its “archaeological matters”.