Italiano
My performance practice develops from the urgency to inquire and display the complexity of (my/your/their) different bodies and identities. I see myself in the interstices of gender definitions, in the liminal space left behind by any categorization. I am particularly interested in the permanent status of (gender) transition, endless research of becoming. With humbleness I act and call for non-binary possibilities, working between activism and performance.
Arte Tag: genere
TITTA COSETTA RACCAGNI
Pornopoetica
Pornopoetica is an art project that explores the border between sexual desire and pornography. Its aim is to either create or open up new visions and possibilities. Pornography usually uses stereotypes. On the opposite Pornopoetica introduces the ideas of unknown and unfamiliar as aesthetical principles and ways to de-construct bodies.
The project questions both the body representation and its performativity. It stages body and the obscene in order to trigger a short-circuit in the approach to pornogrphy.
EVA MAYA
Eva Maya research practice is based on the encounter with the Other. She adopts the anthropological technique of Participatory Observation in order to gain deep experience of different human categories. This allows her to investigate archetypal human identities such as Femininity, Masculinity, Erotical Desire or Power. Identity thus become a wide and varied set of meanings: “I would suggest the possibility to be more”
Ella Bottom Rouge/ Anti Diva
Super femmina, scopro il burlesque dopo anni di teatro fisico. Il mio è un passaggio, un
anti-canone, una liberazione dagli stereotipi. Dentro e fuori il mondo patinato e super
femminile del burlesque c’è anche un altro ambito. Femminile si, glamour, si, ma anche
tanto, terribilmente queer. ……………………………………………
Super femme, I discovered burlesque after years working in theatrical productions.
My character is an anti-canon transition, it’s breaking free the strereotypes.
Inside and outside the glossy and hyper feminine burlesque world there’s another side.
Which is femme, glam and queer as hell.
Cecilia Grasso
How would it be, for a woman, living a day as a man?
The background of a drag show is the opportunity to explore inside the most intimate aspects of Kinging.
From stories and experiences of a group of Drag Kings, daily recorded, it emerges a construction practice identity staging gender stereotypes and bares the predominance of men in our society.
The author, with participant but not intrusive gaze, show fascination and complexity of a little unknown universe, where the surplus becomes spectacle, and the transformation is liberating narrative of the self.
Senith
Senith is a queer drag performer, curator of workshops and events, and queer activist. Co-founder of Eyes Wild Drag, Senith works with the experimentation with roles, genders and the erotic imaginary, and has contributed to the first performative and critical construction of the Faux Queen in Italy, redrawing the queer imaginary around the feminine/femminile. Senith has often captured the attention of national and international media. In 2012, she was involved in a international tour that took her in numerous European cities, as well as in the US. She is the artistic director of the festival GendErotica. In 2013, in the occasion of the festival, she organized the first Italian (and European) Fem Conference, which gathered together numerous artists, activists, and academics from various parts of the world. In the same year, the festival was hosted by Arte Fiera in the city of Verona, in the space curated by the organization CUNTemporary. In 2015, the “Erotic Lunch” was then born: a lunch-show dedicated to erotism, of which Senith is performer and art director. In 2016, Senith creates her first solo show, BAD ASSolo. In the same year, she plays a role as co-protagonist in the documentary Al di là dello specchio (Beyond the mirror), by Cecilia Grasso, which features in several festivals both in Italy and abroad. The film won the best direction award at the Newark International Film Festival (USA). Morover, Senith participates to the realization of the work La Luna in Folle by the Italo-Libanese artist Adelita Hosni-Bey (which was selected for the Maxxi Award 2016) by performing at the Museo Nazionale per le Arti del XXI Secolo on the 29th of Sept.
Marika Puicher
Marika Puicher is a freelance photographer specializing in social reportages. In 2009 she travels to Turkey where she tells the everyday life for Kurds in Istanbul. In summer 2010, she documents the search of the civilians killed in Bosnia during the war. Right after she gets involved in documenting the Italian economic crisis, the drama of the Italian families who fight for their houses, and the Ilva chemical disaster in the area of Taranto. In 2012 she wins the Portfolio Citerna Award with the project “For the children’s sake”, on the terrorist attacks in Italy. Afterward, she produced a series of works on the theme of the LGBT people’s right in Italy, Spain and Morocco. She wins the Pride Photo Award 2015 with the project “Ella”; and the second price with the series “Solo”. Her project “Ella” has been awarded also an honorable mention in the MIFA 2015.
Slavina
Slavina is a multimedia artist: she defines her research and creative field as porn activism. She became a video maker at the DIY school of media activism with Candida TV; in the late ‘90s she was involved as photographer and performer in PhagOff, the first queer party in Rome. In 2005 she moved in Spain where she discovered the post-pornography scenery. Since then, her production has grown focusing on body politics and the representation of sexuality. Chasing an impossible balance between art and activism, in her projects (video, theatre, cabaret and workshops) she wants to enhance the political transformation potential of intimacy sharing. Thanks to her effort in networking and translations, she eased the diffusion in Italy of the most interesting works and artists of the Spanish contemporary feminism. She belongs to the collective of directors “Le ragazze del porno” and to the academic research and performative transnational project of Zarra Bonheur.
Lilly Lablonde
I am a perfomer, writer and director for theatre and cinema. My artistic interest focuses on the desire to represent stories that hardly find their own space in the art world. I have always been very passionate about the topic of gender identity and sexuality.
In my performative works I experiment with different languages of art communication (video, literature, sound and poetry). In the last two years I have been mainly focused in the realization of short films: Immaginare T (2014) and The Second Closet (2015).
Under the artistic name Lilly Lablonde I created the international art project Bibliothèque Érotique that has the goal to work on the topic of erotism and sexuality through literature and the live performance.
Silvia Giambrone
Mainly I use conceptual art to illustrate my own social commentary with a focus on the relation between subject and power. Through several media including performance, installation, sculpture and sound, I explore body practices and contemporary gender politics making viewers aware of the silent and hidden ways power enters everyday life and affects relationships. I am interested in material culture and image culture and I dig into everyday life and practices to reveal, as it was almost an archaeological operation, the signs of both the physical and invisible evidences of the ‘subjectification’ process.
Marsala
MARSALA is an artistic collective born in 2013 from the meeting between Maralla Rita and Teresa Sala. We develop multimedia projects of research about the relationship between body, gender, identity and space. In addition to produce audiovisual materials, “Marsala” promote a visual anthropology workshop aimed to explore the relationship between city and identities in the contemporary society. Rita is a visual anthropologist specialized in different forms of expression: video, collage, installation, photography and writing. Teresa works as a filmmaker and director, alternating commercial work in independent projects. Always interested in the performing arts, in 2015 she writes and directed her first play, “Sanificata”: a monologue about the obsession for cleaning body and spaces.
Alex Hai & Yamada Hanako
Alex Hai is known as the first female gondolier in Venice, Italy. With the collaboration of the artist Yamada Hanako, he made a photographic series to tell about himself
A Queer Culture Illustrated Guide
A Queer Guide is a for-dummies encyclopedia about LGBT world, terms and icons. It’s a fun way to learn and find the things you need to know to fight against ignorance and discrimination. The Guide is open to contribution and to be updated every time someone has something to add.
A Queer Guide is also a little printed booklet. You can purchase it as a nice gift to your loved one, homophobic neighbours, Santa Claus, your parents, and straight friends who constantly ask you “…what’s the deal with you?”
Silvia Chiogna
Per il Film MIRCO ho scelto di non lavorare secondo lo stile documentaristico convenzionale. Non volevo osservare le persone dall’esterno e fare un film sugli altri, i Transgender, i diversi. Volevo affrontare l’argomento Generi nel suo significato generale perché è un argomento che penso riguardi tutti. Per questa ragione, a metà del film, entro in scena io stessa come persona che nel film dovrebbe rappresentare la classica ottica bipolare uomo-donna.
Non ho voluto fare un film che affronta l’argomento raccontando solo il lato deprimente di chi purtroppo si scontra tutti i giorni con una società di generi normativa e rigida, anzi, ho cercato di esplorare questa tematica con leggerezza, riconoscendo nel gioco e nello scherzo un’occasione per mostrare un punto di vista differente. Per questo ho realizzato insieme a uno dei protagonisti alcune scene da Agent provocateur, infrangendo le regole di comportamento di genere e osservare le reazioni delle persone, semplicemente filmandole.
Rambelli e Bigi
’29 our circled world’ is a project realised by Silvia Bigi and Laura Rambelli and stressing the idea that the femininity and the today’s women’s space needs to be re-found searching for new direction.
The 70’s fights have of course helped to give all the social rights, material goods and space to women, but at the same time, they have created a big distance with their real nature. Women and men are not equals, they are different, but this is no one’s fault, this is not a matter of power. This diversity deeply lives in our body, our circled life, our biological and mental transformations. Our diversity is our strength, and – we think – the real nature and meaning of complementary love with men. It’s time to accept it. It’s time to develop a new way of communicating, really connected with us by stopping the search of this condition of “equality” that doesn’t exist. Women have their strengths, their fears, their pain. Men have their own. Man as a man, woman as a woman. We want to gently take action, without violence or strong speeches, this idea applied to today’s men and women.
Riccardo Buscarini
Award-winning choreographer Riccardo Buscarini trained at Accademia Domenichino in Piacenza, Italy, and London Contemporary Dance School graduating in 2009. Since then he has been presenting – and often performing in – his own work in the UK and internationally. Riccardo has also taught choreography and performance at Birkbeck University and lead improvisation and composition workshops internationally.
A curious person of eclectic inspirations, Riccardo is an artist focussed on constantly changing his creative approach to choreography driven by a strong desire for the new. His works to date are all quite different. Although his works have taken different shapes and have been presented in very diverse contexts – theatres, galleries and urban spaces – Riccardo is often inspired by autobiographical events translated in viscerally symbolic expressions.
ideadestroyingmuros
ideadestroyingmuros es un colectivo nacido en venecia en 2005. consideramos imprescindible posicionarnos políticamente en la creación artística. esta práctica ha hecho posible la elaboración de procesos geopolíticos y sociales que nos han atravesado, por medio de la interpretación y la traducción de nuestras experiencias singulares y colectivas.
la perspectiva que hemos compartido se basa en diferentes posiciones fronterizas en relación con los conceptos de nación, género, sexo, lengua y creación, con los cuales buscamos juntas nuevos modos de entender y de practicar resistencia, de realizar procesos creativos, recorridos auto-antropológicos y de autogestión. el auto-empoderamiento y la desgarradura de las relaciónes de poder que tejen lo cotidiano “ideal” nos ayudan a entender los mecanismos de mercado y refuerzan nuestra capacidad de negociación. gracias a esto, reencontramos una conciencia de nuestro valor, que no radica en la explotación y en la medida única del neoliberalismo, sino en la creación de nuevas formas.
Eyes Wild Drag
Eyes Wild Drag is a queer-gender-drag group based in Rome that has worked for several years experimenting with genders, roles and erotic imaginary which represent the main forms of expression employed by women in Italy.
Attivist* queer, they curate workshops and drag events (standing on the thin line between harrowing absurdity and magic poetry), they rediscover and redraw the imaginary feminine queer and they organise Genderotica, an international festival of queer art. In 2012 they travelled around the world for exhibiting their work in different European cities and US states.
In 2013 they were guests of Arte Fiera di Verona, the biggest art fair of Verona, in the space curated by association Cuntemporary. In 2013, they organised the most activist and international edition of GendErotica, bringing for the first time within the Italian queer community the concept of Fem. In the same occasion, they established the first Italian (and European) Fem Conference with the help and contribution of many activists and teachers coming from around the world. They’ve currently been working on the new GendErotica.
Gennaro Maione
Gennaro Maione got trained as a ballet and contemporary dancer at “Ballet Teatro Scuola Rossella Rossi” in Naples and in order to refine his skills attends seminars, lectures and workshops in Berlin at the contemporary dance schools Tanzfabrik and Dock 11 and in Brussels at DCJ contemporary dance school and Thor company.
His project Piel il.el takes its cue from the French novel by T. Jonquet “Tarantula”, then played in the movie by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar “The Skin I Live In.”
It is a performance on the theme of identity. What’s identity? Who can really know? Why is there still a need to confuse “gender identity” with “gender role”?
[…] Gender and sex are two separate things, even though the two words are often used interchangeably. Sex is a physical element whereas “Gender” is a component of identity which is placed in the brain.
Mona Lisa Tina
Mona Lisa Tina is an artist, performer and art therapist based in Bologna. Born in Francavilla Fontana (BR) in 1997, she graduated in 2005 in Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti Bologna [Academy of Fine Art of Bologna] and she mastered in Art Therapy in 2012. Since 2014 she’s activated a formative project on identity at the GAM of Turin in collaboration with the psychoanalyst Giovanni Castaldi. The artist’s work centres on reflections on the body as the site of constant processes of psychic and physical transformation. Her actions are rituals in which the artist’s body is coherently proposed as asexual, always changing and contaminated and where the place of action is often modified in its spatial coordinates. Her performances promote moments of ancestral auto-conscience and of real identity reappropriation so as to introduce an alternative physicality that frees itself from beauty standards.
Sergio Racanati
The center of my work is given by an interest in the social history of man in relation to its urban environment, political and architectural. I analyze the lateral elements forgotten by history; reflecting the relationship between the urban landscape and civil development of man; I question the story of architecture and political community’s behavior studying the relationship between individual memory and collective memory.
A body’s work, but not intimate diary, which eschews any narrative intent to favor an analytical perspective, which aims to build a repository of cultural memory, where to draw references and exemplary to critically review the present time. A research tends towards a critical reading of power systems and the complex reality of the globalized economy. An artistic vision and life that moves within “subcultures of resistance” that intends to resist the massification of urban life, the destruction of the environment and landscape. It’s also act politically through the language of art , when politically assumes the meaning of organization, employment and management of the common, social and collective space.
The contexts that are most involved in my artistic research are “residual”, contexts placed at the edge of the great knowledge production and industrial use as result of ‘”illegal power” and the struggles of speculation about life itself.
The political significance responds to the demands of the “multitude of people” who request the policy of reviewing the dichotomy between public / private, individual vision / collective vision, the same subjects that inspire the contemporary art debate called “public”.
Andy
Andy Gio’s work is an exploration of her own body investigating a specific gender – the feminine one. Starting from this, Andy attempts to question and discuss gender identity through provocation, doubt, the void, banality, pain and last but not least, auto-irony. Andy Gio began her artistic career very young when she’s joined experimental theatre and she’s worked with different theatre companies in Italy, one of which being the Teatro delle Albe [theatre of dawns]. From 2008 to 2011 she was the frontwoman of punk-rock-sdrumm group “Tette Biscottate.” During this period, for two years, she moved to Berlin and worked at the Volksbühne Theatre and with the Dokumentar Theatre company. Lately, she’s been developing performance as the kind of form of art that reunites music with theatre, her biggest passions since a child. According to Andy Gio, the body (as in mind and body) is the most important thing and even though she had a few incidents and a few scars, Andy still practices agonistic sports and still rides her bike.
Maria Teresa Gavazzi
Originally graduated in painting at Accademia di Brera [Brera Academy], Maria Teresa Gavazzi has furthered her studies with degrees in both iron casting at the Art Institute of Chicago and photojournalism at London College of Communication in London. Her practice embraces painting, drawing, collage, photography, video, installation, performance and interactive projects. Gavazzi investigates rituals and passion of current society, reinterpreting each of its stereotypes in order to recreate moments often lucid yet fuelled with humour. Her portraits are the result of an interactive trajectory between the artist and the subject who poses. The artist proposes a theme with the use of symbols and masks which manage to compose a different portrait of oneself in which one can speculate about selfhood and the ambiguity of genders. The vast variety of tools and places engaged in the process, from galleries to studios, public spaces, streets and underground parking lots, confronts, each and every time, diverse public realities. She lives and works in London.
Nina Alexopoulou
Born in Greece, Nina Alexopoulou, has completed her studies in MA Dance Theatre: The Body in Performance at Trinity Laban. Coming from a mainly dance background, Nina holds a BA in Dance Performance from Roehampton Univercity and studied in the Department of Theatre Studies of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Right now, her main interest lies in femininity and female identity and its relation with the notions of abjection, hysteria and food. She is also interested in explicit and intimate performance art, mass and popular culture and cupcakes and candies. Her work takes the form of live art performance, installation and video.
Giovanna Guerrisi
The best way to explore the reality which surrounds me is to work on what I know best – myself. Through the use of painting and photography, my investigation focuses on two fundamental themes: the “disguised” identity and table games. Both ideas, which often mix, inspired me to study the dynamic between players happening during the game and the importance this interaction has on the development and formation of each individual. The sheer joy I felt in my young years when creating costumes transformed through time into the sensual pleasure of transvestitism. Acknowledging that through “masking” I can be someone I am actually not, without losing my true self, I can direct my multiple personalities to a playful and cheerful place.
Roberta Orlando
Blending the simplicity of images in the continuous quest of experimenting without boundaries, Roberta Orlando creates, elaborates and develops the digital impact of visual communication together with the synchronicity of sound exploring troubled, intimate and reflexive territories as well as observing the sensitivity of bodies, sounds and the environments surrounding the realm of senses. Working with photography, video and live media in Europe and US, Orlando’s main topic of research is focused on performance and gender identity (with particular attention to sexual-orientation discrimination). Her works have been exhibited in various public spaces, art galleries and museum all over Europe (Italy, Germany, UK, Spain, France, Norway, Austria, Netherlands, Estonia, Poland, Switzerland, Croatia, Belgium, Greece, Sweden…), USA (New York, Illinois, Florida, California, Pennsylvania) and Canada (Ontario). In 2014 she organised and curated the festival of performance Teoremi with the Archivio Queer Italia and CUNtemporary at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Villa Croce in Genova.
Orlando MYXX e Giovanna Frene
Maschilità XX [Masculinity XX] is a poetic-photographic project that tells of “masculinity without the man,” the “masculine XX,” the one reinterpreted and lived by women (at least genetically) in its most diverse forms; that of androgynous women, of masculine lesbians (butch), of the theatricality of Drag Kings or of that embodied by F2M trans and the more playful and occasional transvestites.
The projects is developed via a series of photographic portraits in diptych form, each followed by a poetic composition and representing the same person in two versions – a “neutral” one, dressed in jeans and white top and a “masculine” other, wearing and posing in the way one feels they’re expressing themselves in all their “masculinity.” The poems, inspired by the interviews with the subjects, are brief narrations of daily lives and the distinctive interpretations each subject has on the idea of the masculine.
Francesco Paolo Catalano
Storytelling and photographic portraiture are used as vehicles for practices of dressing and identity which are culturally determined. Transvestism, the use of make-up, photographic performance and the culture of couture in cinema, theatre and fashion are utilised to observe and question the illusory rigidity of gender identities and the social stereotypes of binaries such as the one between man/woman.
Merisma
Visual artist and performer currently living in Valencia, Spain, Merisma is part of both the ideadestroyingmuros collective and the videoarmsidea project, born in Italy in 2005 and in constant development. From 2001 to 2005, Merisma has also been member of the artistic project Passaporta.
Daniela Comani
“Eine glückliche Ehe” (A Happy Marriage): Daniela Comani is her own model. She stages herself in her multipart photo series simultaneously as a man and a woman, intellectuals in a modern marriage, in which gender relations are no longer supposed to play any significant role.
But the body language speaks a language of its own. The difference in the sameness of the protagonist makes this game subtle and subversive.
Francesca Fini
Francesca Fini (Rome, 1970) is an Italian artist working with new media and performance art. Her live projects, always addressing social and political issues, are mixed with lo-fi technology, homemade interaction design devices, live audio and video. Primarily interested in video and live art, she also creates tangible artworks assembling performance art ‘relics’ and fine art prints of digitally processed video stills.
Among the Art events in which she took part in the last few years, we would mention the 2011 WRO Biennale in Poland, ADD Festival at MACRO Museum in Rome, the finals of Laguna International Art Prize in Venice, CINEMED Film Festival in Montpellier, Taormina Film Festival, Berlin Directors Lounge, IKONO TV Film Festival, FILE Electronic Language International Festival in Brazil, FONLAD Digital Art Festival, Cologne Off and Magmart Video Art Festival, which she won in 2010, 2012 and 201 In 2012 she has been invited to the first “Venice International Performance Art Week”, curated by VestAndPage, featuring among the others the work of Valie Export, Jan Fabre, Yoko Ono, Boris Nieslony and Hermann Nitsch. In 2014 she was selected by the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, organized by the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was invited in Kolkata, India, for the “Ghosts of Shakespeare” Performance Art Festival, and she has been selected to participate to the International Watermill Center Summer Program, directed by Robert Wilson in Watermill, New York.