Arte Tag: queer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Andrea Abbatangelo

Andrea Abbatangelo (°1981, Terni, Italy) makes sculptures and films. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies, Abbatangelo plays with the idea of the mortality of an artwork confronted with the power of a transitory appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense.

His sculptures are an investigation of concepts such as authenticity and objectivity by using an encyclopaedic approach and quasi-scientific precision and by referencing documentaries, ‘fact-fiction’ and popular scientific equivalents. By using an ever-growing archive of found documents to create autonomous artworks, he tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.

Ruben Montini

Born in Oristano in 1986, Ruben Montini currently lives and works in Berlin. His artistic research, mainly focused on themes of gender, studies the implications of the radical and often violent language which has characterised feminist performances since the beginning of the 60s to queer themes.

Amongst his most recent appearances are the performance Cosa resta di noi – Requiem all’Oratoire du Louvre (Paris, 2015) and the collective Fuck Taboo, curated by Carlo Medesani (2013, Galleria Camera16, Milan).

http://www.massimodeluca.it

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.

Kyrahm e Julius Kaiser

Kyrahm is one of the most recognised figures of live art in Italy. She’s a conceptual artist, a video artist, body artist and international performer. She elaborates emotionally-charged performances in which everything that happens is real. She creates innovative concepts and moves between contemporary art and communication. Julius Kaiser is a videomaker, drag king and performance artist. Her own artistic research originates from experimenting and investigating social gender roles as to propose a more fluid vision which respects philosophical Queer theories. Meeting with Kyrahm gave Kaiser’s philosophical contents artistic expression through experimental performances which gained attention all over the world. Kaiser works also as a videomaker and workshops organiser. Kyrahm and Kaiser both operate in the underground scene and the contemporary art world in galleries, museums and international festivals. Together, they organise seminars and events and gave birth to the Italian artistic movement Human Installations.

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.

HARD TON

HARD TON are the italian duo with a larger than life disco sound and a surprising love of metal. Fused together in 2008 from the musical loins of DJ Wawashi and heavy metal singer Max, Hard Ton met online through a site for hirsute loving – though very quickly it became clear their relationship was to be based on a mutual love of music. Finally meeting in person at a party in 2009, over some cherry wine and musings of future hopes and dreams, they solidified their vision. Sylvester-styled falsettos conjure up memories of smoky dancefloors during the heady days of Hi-NRG, which combined with a contemporary sound of accelerated beats and screaming acid basslines, shows a nod to the past can result in a slap across the face for the present.
[taken from I-D Magazine, The Livin’ Loud Issue]

Elisa Giuliano

With her English-titled project “Families of Choice,” Elisa Giuliano tries to explain the ever-increasingly cohabitations between couples of different nationalities. Asking herself what the family term meant nowadays, Giuliano asserts that Italy is a discriminatory country in which the idea “of the diverse” is still currently rooted within the average citizen’s views. Although the traditional concept of Roman-Catholic family is disappearing, Italy doesn’t seem ready to accept that two diverse individuals could be considered constituent of the same family – an opinion that grows even more critical when considering two same-sex individuals. Due to these prejudices many, still today, fight for their rights to be recognised. Thus, “Families of Choice” aims to show existing realities, families that aren’t recognised by the Italian State although existing in their daily life as such. It is a project revolving around all of those whose union is not legally recognised by Italy yet.

exVUOTO Teatro

At the epicentre of exvUoto theathre’s enquiry one can find the attempt to understand and acknowledge the sense of void and/or emptying felt by the contemporary human being, perhaps not anymore alienated but rather inured and anaesthetised. exvUoto theatre starts from the void as to seek the origins of feeling and living.

We alternate working in the theatre (physical and vocal training) to rehearsing at the table texts written by ourselves. We look around ourselves, we “waste time” chasing ineffable sensation that we try to translate into words and then images or vice versa. We work on symbols and metaphors. We return the gaze of the others. We work on the streets, defenceless. We work in a window-shop, rehearsing our spectacle in a decaying shop in front of passer-by’s. Mocking audience and intimate pornography. Even though we are dressed. We work on immobility. We employ a lot of music to hide our breaths, then we stop it suddenly to hear how they sound, or how our articulations do.

Stefania Pedretti

?Alos Muse of Chaos (queer-ancestral-pagan-doom-avant-metal)

Queer because they refuse any gender identity

Ancestral because their music recalls distant and forgotten times, shakes and reconnects a profound side of themselves

Pagan because they are against any type of religion

Doom because their music is slow, physical and penetrative

Avant because their sound is not current

Metal because they are inside of her

?Alos is this and much more: music, performance, dance, political activism, social critique, history, feminism, anarchy

?Alos is chaos embodied   

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.

Ninas Drag Queen

Nina’s Drag Queens is a theatre group born in Milan at Teatro Ringhiera that produces rivista shows, original scripts, classic theatre adaptations and that stages workshops for junior drag and faux queens. According to how they describe their practice, their work is comparable to the figure of the clown: “we wear costumes, full-face make-up and we engage the audience with our comedy.” However, they continue, “it is not all about that: a drag queen, -for our understanding-, not only makes one laugh, it makes them thrilled, disturbed, moved.

We’re imitators before actors. We manipulate what is already in existence. Playback and referencing are thus turned into our expression. It’s a sort of ironic method, which denies itself, which is always as well, carrier of a point of view on what it represents which ultimately generates juxtapositions of sense. We don’t try to represent femininity as much as we try to represent the feminine form, the “woman-image” before the woman herself. “

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.