MEDIA PROJECT: Capture, Alter, Order

"For this assignment you are asked to do two things:

Firstly - To locate or record a collection of material to use for this project (images/video clips/sounds/texts). This could come either found images or data from: Newspapers, social media, current affairs, fashion and politics or even statistical data or recorded, documentary photography/video/sound on the street, set up in a location or captured on a journey. The most important thing is that you find something that is curious to you as a starting point.

Secondly - You will imply meaning to this material during the studio time available using various forms of media (photography/moving image/sound) as tools to express an idea and refine this to communicate with or affect your audience in an interesting way. This might involve trying to imply a particular feeling or mood, you may consider strategies such as the typology, taxonomy, accumulation or appropriation of existing material."

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Starting point: Paris is Burning (1990)

I have always been fascinated by subcultures, and how humans so often respond to their historical and socio-economic contexts in unexpected and creative ways. Currently, I am immensely interested in the New York drag explosion of the 90s, and the stories of those involved. So, choosing a starting point I'm interested in, I have decided to begin my project by responding to the 1990 documentary by Jennie Livingston, Paris is Burning, which documented the drag "ball" culture of that time period.

On the film's content:

"Paris is Burning presents the lives of an ensemble cast of real people in the Harlem drag ball scene of the late 80s – a subculture located at a unique crossroads of urban poverty, marginalised black and Latin communities and queer identity. If I were to try and explain it to someone who had never seen it, I would say that the film is a meditation on how specific individuals – consistently robbed by society of privileges which many watching would take for granted – regenerate and create among themselves a new capacity for self-worth, for value, for joy and, crucially, for family."

On language and appropriation:

"Minority language and slang like that of ball culture are tricky things – when they proliferate they become mere artefacts and their original context inevitably gets lost. [...] While the expansion of language is both inevitable and perhaps harmless, its counter effect is more troubling – forgetting the people who enriched both white gay and heterosexual culture at no benefit to themselves. ... The invention of voguing, a dance art form the film displays repeatedly, was subsequently attributed to Madonna. Who, much as I love her, shamelessly stole it ."

On the tragedy of Venus Xtravaganza and modern context:

"..one of the films most brilliant characters, Venus Xtravaganza, is particularly open about her 'transsexuality'. Despite being assigned male at birth she says there is “nothing mannish about me”. Venus is the errant ‘daughter’ of drag mother Angie Xtravaganza and is a sex worker who dreams of being a spoilt, rich white woman. She provides the film with its most acerbic reads and its most chilling narrative arc. In a haunting prefiguration, Venus speaks on camera about how a client once tried to kill her when he discovered she was trans. However, during filming, and placed towards the end of the film itself, we learn from her mother Angie that Venus was, ultimately, murdered – found strangled in a hotel room four days after her death. She was 23.

As a trans journalist, I find the scene of Angie describing Venus’ death always produces an effect where I feel like I have been punched. Not least because as a trans viewer of the film I connect to her onscreen presence but because I know that what happened to her still happens to trans women of colour: now, more than ever. Last year saw the highest rates of slaughter of trans people on record. This year, 17 trans people have been killed in America: women like Monica Loera, Deeniquia Dodds and Skye Mockabee have been killed just like Xtravaganza was. The general narrative that LGBT people’s rights have advanced and progressed significantly since her death in 1988 rides roughshod over the fact that, for black and Latina trans women, things are now much worse."

[all quotes taken from the linked article | by Shon Faye]

Venus is a character who I found particularly captivating, so considering the larger context of her death and reflecting on the current state of trans rights is an important point. Her voice in the documentary is both alluringly soft and compellingly brazen, and many of her quotes are among the most memorable in the film.

"I would like to be a spoiled rich white girl. They get what they want, whenever they want it. They don't have to really struggle with finances, nice things, nice clothes, and they don't have to have that as a problem."

[on prostitution] "I feel like, if you're married? A woman, in the suburbs, a regular woman, if you want your husband to buy a washer and dryer set, I'm sure she'd have to go to bed with him, to give him something he wants, to get what she wants. So, in the long run, it all ends up the same way."

"Some of them say that we're sick, or crazy, and some of them think that we're the most gorgeous special things on earth."

Experimenting with Premiere, I created this short video inspired by the final monologue of Venus Xtravaganza (published privately with a password due to the use of Paris is Burning clips).