—Lost in Transition _a performative poem, 2016
Video-installation

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Lost In Transition_a performative poem appeals to the exhibition space as a place open to transitional narratives. The project was the result of an invitation from the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) to intervene in Gallery 6 of the museum. Starting from the idea of using the exhibition space as a film set, Lost in Transition focused its attention on the staircase connecting the two floors of the gallery, an architectural element that in principle plays no part in the exhibition function itself. As a link between two spaces, the staircase is intended for a secondary use; however, it was chosen here as a conceptual core. As a perpetual place of transition it comes to be the ideal central setting, a metaphor of intermediate areas, of constant movement and change.
Parodying Marcel Duchamps’s well-known Nude Descending a Staircase, the action consisted of calling on members of the trans, drag, genderfluid, genderqueer, queer, agender, etc. community living in the city of Valencia to participate in a recorded performance that would consist of descending the stairs of Gallery 6. The instructions were limited to the time of the descent, which should not be too long. Apart from this, everyone chose which person or situation they were going to represent on the reality of the staircase. The descent was made alone and the sum of them would make up a visual poem that would be captured on video. In the end we had the collaboration of sixteen participants who made two different descents each. The result was exhibited in a multiscreen installation.
Set designs in theatre and film have given the staircase an essential role in presenting/introducing their leading characters. And it is at the intersection between one place and another, between the contemporary art exhibition space and the theatrical space, that the perception of the ambiguity, transience and variability of genders is activated in Lost in Transition. The bodies descending in this constant walk downstairs construct possibilities of presence between the canonic duality, referencing it but transgressing it, destabilising it. The disruption of the everyday brought about by these activated bodies turns all its protagonists, in their day-to-day lives, into stars.
But the outside has an outside: at IVAM the installation was completed with a video-portrait, a screen test conducted in the manner of Andy Warhol, of a trans woman who lives her life outside the system, a person for whom queer theory and social changes have come too late to be able to enable her to live freely. These changes that are taking place, and could be slowly consolidated, cannot erase the past nor the traces of rejection, and her face interrogates us.

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Lost in Transition _a performative poem performers: Ainhoa, Allan, Anna María, Carmen, chris guarrillerx, Cristal Red, Cristian Germán
, Eva Pez, Gala, Graham Bell, Kiara d Loren, Lilí Tras Tras, Liz, Mad Vicious, Martina Gual, Manu S. Manu