Trans*Revolutions Virtual Symposium
#TransRevolutions
Live captioning is available here.
During the event, you can send questions for the Q&A by emailing bcrw@barnard.edu or via Twitter @bcrwtweets #TransRevolutions
Trans*Revolutions is a virtual symposium featuring artist-activists whose work is inspired by and engaged in imagining trans* and genderqueer histories, performances, identities, and aesthetics. Elliot Montague (film), Emma Frankland (performance), Texas Isaiah (photography), Tourmaline (film), and Vick Quezada (multimedia and performance) will deliver artist talks, followed by a roundtable and Q&A. The symposium will explore such questions as: How do trans* theoretical lenses, artistic practices, and performances address and resist ongoing violence against trans* people, in particular those of color, and fashion alternative modes of activating, archiving, transforming, and transfiguring revolutionary landscapes and embodied knowledges across space and time?
Related Links
ACLU information about the anti-trans lawsuit mentioned during event intro.
HOW TO JOIN
This event will take place online only. You can tune in here on the event page, where the conversation will stream live at 2PM – 4PM EST on 3/27.
We recommend viewing the artists’ art and films posted below before the conversation.
View the films and art below, email questions to bcrw@barnard.edu, contribute questions here, or via Twitter @bcrwtweets, or on BCRW’s Facebook page, and join us for this online conversation on Friday, March 27.
ACCESSIBILITY: This event is free and everyone is welcome. Live-captioning will be provided. The event livestream and captioning will be available on the event page. Please email any additional access needs to bcrw@barnard.edu.
A NOTE FROM THE ORGANIZERS
Trans*Revolutions was envisioned as a two-day symposium to be held at Wesleyan University hosted by the Center for the Humanities in conjunction with its 50th Anniversary theme of “Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures” and co-sponsored by Barnard College’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. When, two weeks ago, it seemed that Trans*Revolutions would have to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Tourmaline proposed a virtual event instead. In the whirlwind, Hope Dector stepped in to make this possible, generously offering their labor and expertise, as well as the use of BCRW’s online platform. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to Hope, BCRW, Elizabeth Castelli and Janet Jakobsen, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Barnard College, and, of course, to Vick, Tourmaline, Texas Isaiah, Emma, and Elliot. Erinn Savage at Wesleyan was integral to every aspect of the symposium’s planning and re-planning. Thank you all for your creativity and care.
We also would like to thank our co-sponsors at Wesleyan University: The Center for African American Studies; Center for Film Studies; the Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program; and the Departments of American Studies, Art & Art History, History, Sociology, and Theater. Abigail Boggs, Catherine Damman, and Katherine Brewer Ball offered their encouragement and invaluable advice throughout.
With all best wishes,
Natasha Korda, Director, Center for the Humanities, pronouns: she/her/hers
Heather Vermeulen, Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for the Humanities, pronouns: she/her/hers
Contact: hvermeulen@wesleyan.edu
SPEAKER BIOS AND ART
Please learn about the artists below and view their work before the symposium on 3/27.
EMMA FRANKLAND
Emma is a live performance and theatre artist. Her work often focuses on honesty, action and a playfully destructive DIY aesthetic. She uses materials with different transformative properties – such as water, clay, earth, salt and ink – to create strong visual imagery which is often messy, intense and celebratory. In recent years, her work has been focussed on the None of Us is Yet a Robot project, a series of performance pieces recently published by Oberon Books as None of Us is Yet a Robot: Five Performances on Gender Identity and the Politics of Transition. It’s a remarkable body of work that encompasses the past decade of trans politics in the UK.
In 2013 she was a featured artist at the British Council Showcase and since then has performed in São Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Jakarta, Toronto and across the UK & Europe. Emma’s diverse collection of work includes “We Dig” (a show which literally demolished Ovalhouse Theatre with a company of 19 trans women and femmes); an anarchic adaptation of “Don Quijote”; and “Galatea”, a 500-year-old queer love story. As a performer and dramaturg she has collaborated with many artists including Rachel Mars, Travis Alabanza and Jo Clifford and with multiple organisations in the UK and around the world including the Young Vic, Buddies in Bad Times, Stratford International Festival, the BBC and the Marlborough Theatre.
“Emma Frankland is the punk rock angel of your dreams and nightmares…” (Francesca Peschier, The Stage)
Films and Performance
Rituals for Change: The Film
44 minutes, Color, 2018
Short documentary about “We Dig” (2019)
Hearty
Trailer:
TEXAS ISAIAH
Texas Isaiah is a visual narrator based in Los Angeles, Oakland, and NYC. The intimate works he creates center the possibilities that can emerge by inviting Black and Brown individuals to participate in the photographic process. He is attempting to shift the power dynamics rooted in photography to display different ways of accessing support in one’s own body. Texas Isaiah’s work has been exhibited in numerous spaces such as Aperture Foundation Gallery (NYC), Charlie James Gallery (LA), Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), Residency (LA), Hammer Museum (LA), and The Kitchen (NYC). His work has been featured in Artforum, The FADER, Vice, LALA Magazine, and Cultured Magazine. He is one of the 2018 grant recipients of Art Matters and the 2019 recipient of the Getty Images: Where We Stand Creative Bursary grant.
Photography
View Texas Isaiah’s work on his website or Instagram @KingTexas
VICK QUEZADA
Vick Quezada was raised in El Paso, Texas, along the US/Mexico border. Their work addresses the functionality of objects in indigenous, queer, and Latinx cosmologies. Quezada has exhibited at the Nolan-Smith College, the Mead Art Museum, and NYU Flex Space. They were selected as the UMCA 2017-18 fellow where they curated Five Takes on African Art with Fred Wilson. Quezada’s work has been published and featured in the Believer Magazine, Trans Studies Quarterly, and Remezcla. Quezada was most recently awarded a Massachusetts Art Council grant and is currently the 2019-2020 artist-in-residence at the NYU Latinx Project. They received a BA from the University of Texas at El Paso and graduated with an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2018.
Artist Statement
My projects explore the material histories and consciousness of Indigenous-Latinx hybridity within Western culture. My approach is multidisciplinary and based in botany, historical archives, ancestral knowledge and lived experience.
I identify as nonbinary transgender Indigenous-Latinx. My practice calls into question structures that fragment Indigenous identity and queer bodies. I use a variety of mediums, video performance, photography, sculpture and ceramics. I experiment with the materiality of objects and the meanings the cultural significance they produce. My sculptural “artifacts” also incorporate natural elements, such as soil and flora, making reference to Nanuan Indigenous beliefs that affirm the interconnectivity of earth, spirit and cosmology (Sigal, 2011).
Maize, as material and theme, is present in almost all works. Maize is native to Mexico and is a monoecious plant that has both masculine and feminine reproductive organs. Ironically, historical Aztec ethnographies document that the ancient female and male maize deity Chicomecōātl/Centeōtl displayed gender duality and ambiguity, which were mirrored in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societal beliefs on gender (Milbrath 2015). The essence of my projects specifically honor Indigenous cultural practice. In queering the archaeological, I desire to offer an understanding of gender and sexuality outside of the dominant heteropatriarchal narratives.
Video
Destined For Gold
Performance Video, 11:52
Cinematography/Filmmaker: Amanda Boggs
ELLIOT MONTAGUE
Elliot Montague’s films explore the nuances of trans and queer narratives through engagement with familial relationships, spirits, and rural landscapes. His work has contributed significantly to the current wave of “New Trans Cinema.” Over the past two decades, Elliot’s films have received international recognition at dozens of festivals and museums, including the Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Dashanzi Arts Festival in Beijing, among others. Elliot is a twice recipient of the prestigious Princess Grace Award from the Princess Grace Foundation and his films are partially distributed through Women Make Movies and Video Data Bank. He teaches film production at Mount Holyoke College.
Artist Statement
The story for Light on a Path, Follow originates from my own desire for parenthood and the experience of pregnancy as a transgender masculine person. Pregnancy and birthing are often assumed as a woman’s experience, but the film expands who is able to be pregnant. It is not simply trying to redefine the pregnant body as a masculine or a trans-masculine experience, but it explores pregnancy as a mode of thinking about transitions to other spiritual worlds or other kinds of connections. I think of pregnancy as not only bringing life into the world but also into oneself. For a trans person, this sort of “transitioning” can be a very powerful opportunity to find a sense of home or solace within oneself.
Films
Light on a Path, Follow
15 minutes, color, 4k digital video, 2019
Watch the trailer
Still image from film:
Synopsis: Joaquín, a transman living in rural 1990s New England, is eight months pregnant. After encountering a mysterious spirit in the forest, Joaquín goes into labor early. Is this spirit haunting or guiding Joaquín as he awaits his midwife?
Camp Trans
6 minutes, color/b&w, digital video, 2016
Synopsis: Part of the award-winning webseries We’ve Been Around (created by Rhys Ernst, produced by Christine Bebe, and presented by Focus Features), Camp Trans is a portrait of trans activists Leslie Feinberg and Riki Anne Wilchins who lead a movement to end a trans-exclusionary women’s music festival.
TOURMALINE
Tourmaline makes film and installed video that highlights the capacity of black queer/trans social life to impact the world while living what is simultaneously an invisible—and hypervisible—existence. The throughline of her filmmaking focuses on everyday people and their mundane creative acts that blur the lines and liens of what constitutes public.
Her work includes Salacia, Mary of Ill Fame, Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, The Personal Things, Lost in the Music, and Happy Birthday, Marsha! She is also an editor of TRAP DOOR, an anthology on trans cultural production published by the New Museum & MIT Press.
She received a BA from Columbia University and is the recipient of the 2018 Publishing Triangle Award, Special Mention at 2018 Outfest Film Festival, 2017 HBO & Queer/Art Prize, and 2016 Art Matters Foundation Grant. She is a 2016-2017 participant in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace program, and a 2012-2013 Queer/Art/Mentorship fellow. From 2014-2018 she was Barnard College Center for Research On Women’s activist in resident.
Her work has been presented across the world including at the Museum of Modern Art (2019), the Brooklyn Museum (2016, 2019), MoMA PS1 (2019), The Kitchen (2018), BFI Flare (2018), Portland Art Museum (2018), BAM Cinematek (2018), The New Museum (2017), The Whitney Museum (2017), MOCA LA (2017), the Studio Museum in Harlem (2017), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2017).
Film
Atlantic is a Sea of Bones
7 minutes, color, 2017