TROPICAL VIDEO ACTIVISM. Transformative Illegalities & Post-Porning Genders

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Curated by Fernanda Nogueira

March 7, 2015, 4-9pm, VBKÖ, Vienna

This screening program stems from the urgencies of a collective body, a body formed by fragments, a mutant, which resists any classification, provocative, unsatisfied, which creates new ways of living by acting in the territory of transgression. Tropical Video Activism presents video productions – either registers of actions or more experimental poetics – as signs to make visible, read and spread social transformations, which are in furious excitement in the public sphere in many Southern geographies.

These processes are not happening just in a single territory. We can map the social effervescence, the networks arising and intensifying the emergence and encounter of new transborder communities capable of sharing activist tools and circulating critical information which in the past could only be found in independent, underground and thought marginal networks. Facing the urgency of action and its various potentialities in these different territories, the modern categories such as “originality” or “authenticity” are turned obsolete. In contrast, a broader notion of “network” is strengthen daily in the configuration of a collective battlefield […]

Wu Tsang: Wildness (2012)

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Directed by Wu Tsang. Wildness is a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic, LGBT-friendly bar on the eastside of Los Angeles that has catered to the Latin immigrant community since 1963. With a magical-realist flourish – the bar itself becomes a character in the film – Wildness captures the creativity and conflict that ensue when a group of young, queer artists of colour (Wu Tsang, DJs NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom) organise a weekly performance art party, called Wildness, at the bar. What does ‘safe space’ mean, and who needs it? The search for answers to these questions creates coalitions across generations.

Luis F.Bernanza/Margaret Gilpin: Mariposas en el andamio (1996)

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by Luis Felipe Bernaza, Margaret Gilpin

After the Revolution, gays were not respected in Cuba, but in the small Havana neighborhood of La Güinera, a few courageous women came to power and encouraged the gay community. Glamorous gowns fashioned from grain sacks and eyelashes made out of carbon paper are the reality of drag in Cuba. In La Güinera, gay transvestite performers have earned respect and status through creative work for the neighbourhood. On stage action and backstage preparation opens out into insightful interviews with community leaders, families, and the performers themselves.

Pêdra Costa: de_colon_isation (2017->)

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de_colon_isation is a live performance series to create a space of intimacy and political claim through the body, live images by a dildo camera and “The Southern Butthole Manifesto”. It uses post-porn as a strategy of pleasure, aesthetics and politics. Playing the artist as an exhibitionist, it shows performance art as a place to interact […]

Marissa Lôbo: Fuck you queer white supremacy celebration! (2012)

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The video performance developed and performed by Marissa Lôbo in collaboration with Nataša Mackuljak, Alessandra do Santos Silva, Xhejlane Rexhepi and  Noemi Auer is an intervention on  Colonial desire and otherness, sexuality, racialized bodies, contra esthetic,  migrant-precarious bodies,  sex work, society double moral,  and  the regime of Western  bodies politics. Marissa Lôbo is a migrant black activist and […]

Katia Sepulveda: Pascha Revolution (2011)

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Performance on February 14th 2011, Cologne, Germany, 12:30 p.m. “Anticapitalism of love” with Amy Rush. Sepulveda and Rush are having sex at the main entrance of Pascha”, the biggest brothel in Cologne, intervening the „power architecture“, and the hyper-heteronormativity they represent. Katia Sepulveda’s work focuses on questions related to sex, gender and sexuality, resistance to […]