Claude Cahun Nantes 1894-Isla de Jersey 1954 A French artist, photographer and writer. Her work, which was both political and personal, and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality, is regarded today as a landmark in the history of representations of Lesbian identity. Barbara Hammer’s film Lover Other: The Story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (2006, 55 min) follows Claude Cahun and her life-long partner Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) from 1920s Paris to Nazi-occupied Jersey in the 1940s, alternating between still pictures, archive footage, dramatic interludes based on a “found script”, and interviews with Jersey residents who knew the couple.
Barbara Hammer (EUA) , 1939 A pioneer of queer cinema, Barbara Hammer has gained an international reputation in the field of American experimental cinema. One of the first film-makers to openly explore Lesbian sexuality and women’s pleasure, her oeuvre mixes genres, formats and avant-garde techniques, dealing with gender both through personal, autobiographical materials, and through memory archives and hidden lesbian and gay histories.
colectivo LSD Madrid 1993-1999 The LSD acronym may stand for Lesbians Sweating Desire, Lesbian-Specific Difference, Lesbian Suspects Dancing, Lesbian-Supported Disorder… and every conceivable combination. An interview with Fefa Villa, co-founder of the LSD collective, by Gracia Trujillo and Marcelo Expósito, in Desacuerdos: Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español, Cuaderno 1.
Film: Paris Is Burning (EUA) Dir. Jennie Livingston, 1990 Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African American, Latino, gay and transgender communities involved in it. In the film the elaborately-structured Ball competitions are shown in all their intricacy as parodies of normative aesthetics- from clothing to walking in fashion shows- which denaturalised hetero-normative masculinity or femininity, and drag is presented as a complex performance of gender, class and race, in which one can express one's identity, desires and aspirations along many dimensions. The film depicts people with different gender identities or communities and their different forms of expression. It also explores how its subjects dealt with the adversity of racism, homophobia, AIDS and poverty.
Del LaGrace Volcano (EUA) , 1957 Del LaGrace Volcano is a gender-variant visual artist and cultural producer working with the body and gender/sexual identity notions for both social, political and personal purposes. Del has produced four monographs: Love Bites (1991), The Drag King Book (with Judith Halberstam) (1999), Sublime Mutations (2000), and Sex Works (2005).
Children of Srikandi. Children of Srikandi Collective, Indonesia-Germany-Swizerland, 73 min. 2012, The Children of Srikandi Collective (Imelda Taurinamandala, Eggie Dian, Oji, Yulia DWI Andriyanti, Winnie Wibowo, Hera Danish, Stea Lim y Afank Mariani) started with a workshop which lead to a collaborative film project reflecting the directors’ lived experiences as queer women in Indonesia, and at the same time providing them with the means for exploring issues such as religion, identity, violence and social exclusion.
Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry. Alemania-Germany , Their works often revisit materials from the past, usually photographs or films, referring to and excavating unrepresented or illegible moments of queerness in history. These works show embodiments which are not only able to cross different times, but also to draw relations between these different times, thus revealing possibilities for a queer futurity. In Normal Work, N.O.Body, and Contagious, the focus is the history of sex and gender discourses and practices, as well as the meaning of ‘visibility’ since early modernity. The works thematize the ways that the staging of visibility takes over functions like self-empowerment, glamour, and recognition, while also devaluing, pathologizing, and criminalizing. They reflect the nearly simultaneous invention of sexual perversions and photography as well as their relation to the colonial economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
