White Frame Online Series

26.10.–02.11.2023, online

art of intervention wurde von White Frame eingeladen, diesen Herbst ein Kurzfilmprogramm zu kuratieren. In Zusammenarbeit mit Roan Ezra Schmid entstand die folgende Auswahl, die sich um das Thema trans dreht. Für eine Woche (26.10.–02.11.2023) können die Kurzfilme online geschaut werden. Der folgende Einführungstext sowie das Filmprogramm sind Englischsprachig:

White Frame, co-founded by Chantal Molleur and Stella Händler, produces and curates exhibitions and screenings, providing artists with greater visibility for their art. Established in 2011 in Basel, Switzerland, the non-profit, nomadic association operates primarily at the intersection of video art, cinema, and photography. White Frame aims to build national and international networks and foster collaborations. They initiate and implement projects, facilitating exchanges between Swiss and international artists, institutions, independent curators, festival programmers, writers, and the public. For the second program of 2023, Online Series White Frame invited us, art of intervention (aoi), to co-create a film program and showcase our work. For this film program, we extended an invitation to our long-time collaborator, Roan Ezra Schmid.

For additional information about the program, we invite you to tune in to our audio interview featuring Roan Ezra Schmid with Dominique Grisard and Andrea Zimmermann, co-founders of aoi, which will be accessible on October 26th.

Firstly, there is a strong focus on collaboration and forming effective alliances, which is reflected in part of the program featuring documentaries. These documentaries explore biographies, personal knowledge, places of identity, and connections between individuals, all with the aim of fostering meaningful alliances.

On the other hand, there is a more speculative aspect to the program that encourages imagination and explores utopian ideas. This aspect delves into the possibilities of transformation and trance, inviting viewers to consider what might be possible.

Gender art and trans cultures play prominent roles in these films, and the activism aspect emerges through the exploration of transgender experiences in short film format. This provides a platform for discussing topics like trans joy, rage, the origins of transgender identity, and the unique genealogies of trans individuals. These films aim to spark important conversations while remaining concise and accessible, offering a comprehensive exploration of trans cultures within our broader themes.”

Film Program

Don’t Look into the Sun
by Raphael Reichert
Switzerland, 2020, 12 mins 10, English

Don‘t look into the Sun consists of an interview with Indian-born actress and trans gender activist Living Smiley Vidya, who is currently in the asylum process. This interview is combined with more than a hundred recordings of the sun, filmed with a smartphone over the time span of several weeks during the first Corona lockdown.

My Boyfriend, Coyote / My Girlfriend, Bambi 
by Coyote Park
USA, 2022, 21 mins, English

My boyfriend Coyote, my girlfriend Bambi is an experimental short that documents Park’s journey through a series of camcorder footage. The audio is a conversation between themself, documenting the love that they have found through a journey of shapeshifting. Bambi, a character/persona/extension of Park, that they find understandings of the way that their connection of loving others as a trans person begins with themself.

Housewives Making Drugs
by Mary Maggic
USA, 2017, 10 mins 12, English

What if it were possible to synthesize hormones in the kitchen? Imagine if this was as easy and simple as cooking a meal. “Housewives Making Drugs” is a fictional cooking show where the trans-femme stars, Maria and Maria teach the audience at home step-by-step how to cook their own hormones. They perform a simple “urine-hormone extraction recipe” while amusing the audience with their witty back-and-forth banter about body and gender politics, institutional access to hormones, and everything problematic with heteronormativity. Choosing the kitchen as the appropriate battleground for tackling body/gender politics and institutional access, the cooking show aims to challenge/subvert patriarchal society and speculate on a world with greater body sovereignty for all.

The Prince of Homburg
by P. Staff
USA, 2019, 23 mins, English

P. Staff’s vibrant, colour-coded video uses text from Heinrich von Kleist’s 19th-century play of the same name to explore themes of persecution and punishment to meditate upon contemporary issues of gender, queer resistance, and the carceral state. Through an unconventional narrative structure, Staff’s video cuts together a narration of Kleist’s play with interviews, conversation, found footage, hand painted animation and song. In a series of fragmented ‘daytime’ sequences, a range of artists, writers and performers reflect on contemporary queer and trans identity and its proximity to desire and violence. Intercut with flashes of the sun and sky, city streets and text, subjects include Sarah Schulman, Che Gossett, Macy Rodman and Debra Soshoux. Each of these segments is punctuated by ‘night-time’ diversions, narrated by writer Johanna Hedva in the dual role of both narrator and Prince. Loosely following the structure of Kleist’s play, the sleepwalking Prince struggles with his somnambulant habits, and the invasion of the unconscious mind into flesh and bone. In half-remembered dream images, the narrative unfolds through flashes of nocturnal gardens, high visibility reflective clothing, neon signs and a lugubrious ballad.

The Personal Things
by Tourmaline
USA, 2019, 23 mins, English

Released on Trans Day of Remembrance 2016, „The Personal Things“ is a short animated film based on an interview—conducted by Tourmaline —with Miss Major, director emeritus of the Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project, a program that assists transgender persons who are disproportionately incarcerated under the prison-industrial complex. Miss Major is a „community leader―an organizer, activist, prison abolitionist, former sex worker, formerly incarcerated person, transgender elder and mother to countless transgender and GNC youth“ (HuffPo). „The Personal Things“ focuses on the „small every day ways Miss Major Griffin-Gracy fights back and challenges the status quo,“ Tourmaline writes. „At a moment of increased violence I wanted to release it on Trans Day of Resilience/Remembrance because Miss Major is someone whose life and labor has allowed for so many of us to live, including myself.“ Featuring the voice of Miss Major, directed by Tourmaline, illustrated by Micah Bazant, animated by Pamela Chavez, scored by Geo Wyeth, produced by Hope Dector and BCRW (Barnard Center for Research on Women).

Introductory text

The films at hand reflect our politics and practice. All of them strongly emphasise relationality as central to fathoming ‹the/a [trans] self›. They are an ode to resistance. For one, to resisting individualisation by relating oneself to culturally and societally marginalised materialities, elders, genealogies, and communities while opening affective pathways to empathy.

Moreover, the selection challenges normative and naturalised notions of gender by breaking with restrictive cohesion, formally as well as narratively. Many films on trans experiences portray a journey from point A to point B: male to female / female to male. By forcing trans embodiment into a logic that no longer resists oppressive, colonial gender norms, we/they become understandable, palatable; integrated into these exact systems. While some of the films pick up on this trope, they do so by rewriting it (see for example sequences of Tourmaline’s „The Personal Things“). In that way they contribute to alternative genealogies and narratives beyond the logic of a cis-hetero-patriarchal white gender order. Formally, the films offer intervening techniques resembling collage (see the ending of Maggic’s „Housewives Making Drugs“) and – in other cases – by employing interweaving edits of multiple, dislocated yet relating scenes. In this way, they create transdisciplinary work and queer temporal spaces (such as Park’s „My Boyfriend, Coyote / My Girlfriend, Bambi“ and Reichert’s „Don’t Look into the Sun“ and Staff’s “The Prince of Homburg”).

Earlier this year, art of intervention had the chance to hold such a space with the Indian performance artist and trans activist Living Smile Vidya and her mentor in the process of producing an autobiographical performance piece about her metamorphosis and journey from a Dalit Indian family to a Swiss asylum center. Incidentally, Smiley is also the subject of Raphael Reichert’s experimental documentary short “Don’t Look into the Sun”. Our collaboration with Smiley gives testament to two interconnected conditions of possibility for interventions, the fundamental necessity of supportive networks and the relatability of biography. Telling her life story, and making herself vulnerable in the process, allows the audience to affectively connect and empathize with Smiley.

Along with Smiley we also believe in the subversive, at times connecting power of humor, exemplified by the 2017 experimental short “Housewives Making Drugs”. Artist and bio hacker Mary Maggic’s film is a camp parody of a cooking show, a diy (do it yourself) instructional video and a dit (do it together) bio hacking transactivist intervention rolled into one. The seemingly apolitical, private kitchen becomes a site for experimentation, dreams and critical hope for a world with body sovereignty for all. In our recent event series Kitchen Politics with Kunstmuseum Basel Gegenwart, we invited Mary Maggic to discuss their practice. For us it was clear that we would like to continue collaborating with Maggic and learn from their visionary dit politics.

In Staff’s „The Prince of Homburg,“ too, dreaming signifies a temporal space of complicated resistance. One wherein we can find ourselves secluded – withdrawing from and ultimately imprisoned by oppression and othering – and at the same time it can open a space wherein we can envision a future of caring collaboration.