Every New Normality Has its Dissidence
LGTBIQ+ 2020 Programme
Amid the deeply unusual context brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Museo Reina Sofía joins the LGTBIQ+ Pride celebration by examining the legacies of sexual and gender dissidence. More than ever, such dislocated, irreverent and rebellious legacies materialise as vectors of the imagination and critical resistance to the naturalised “return to normality”, with our collective experience in facing the current health emergency bearing a relation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, bolstering the importance of rescue and a revision of forms of resistance and care historically formulated by the LGTBIQ+ collective.
From the crossroads of sexual and gender dissidence with the migrant condition, can we question forms of control and discourse around social distancing, based largely on a univocal idea of subject, body and desire? How can we activate and articulate this dissident knowledge to invent other possibilities of supporting and caring for ourselves, and, most importantly, to continue fighting for the right to non-standard lives?
This programme assembles highly diverse affections and intensities, uttered from equally distinctive voices and contexts, expressing pain, rage, delirium, and pride. Despite this disparity, the common denominator lies in declarations from indifference, an irreducible difference that denounces and rebels before the violence of processes of normalisation and homogenisation, to which the art institution is no stranger either.
Programa
This workshop, conducted by artist and activist Kaioia Luco, to make proud, irreverent, dislocated masks, to practice new involvement, is structed around two sessions: the first on revising the current forms of social distancing and its languages, and what is entailed when inhabiting a public space cross-cut with notions and habits related to “health”, “hygiene”, and “individuality”; and a second which sets out a re-reading of daily objects and old materials prone to being re-assembled in this exercise to imagine and tailor dissident masks, moving away from the concept of “mouth coverings” to become forms of critical expression.
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Organised by: Museo Situado
Coordinator: Kaioia Luco
Programme: Graphic Outbreak
Date: Monday, 29 and Tuesday, 30 June 2020
Time: 5pm
Place: Taller de Diógenes - C/ Fernando Mora, 8, bajo (next to Parque de San Isidro, Carabanchel), Madrid
Admission: free, with prior registration by filling out the following form, until 26 June.
Mama Lynch (Lyncoln Diniz) has developed the performance action Basket de las excluidas (Basket of the Excluded) since 2015. With editions in Brazil, Portugal and Mexico, this self-managed activity surfaced in Madrid after a group of people decided to occupy a public court to play transvestite basketball. In these “games” they sought to break the oppressive cis hetero culture that predominates sports practices, as well as celebrating cultural diversity, gender transgression and sexuality.
The encounter sets out to debate, from performance practices, concepts such as “sexuality”, “exile”, “migration” and “guerrilla art”. The present lockdown has spotlighted how the restrictions imposed by the state of emergency are only something new for those considered “normal” — isolation, hyper-surveillance and control of movement are customary experiences in the daily life of marginal subjects and bodies.
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Coordinated by: Mama Lynch (Lyncoln Diniz)
Date and hour: Wednesday, 1 July 2020 - 7pm
Location: Live stream from the Nouvel Auditorium 400. Link on 1 July
Access: free
The first session of the audiovisual series Uncertain Times II is framed inside the special programme offered by the Museo during LGTBIQ+ Pride week. Bearing the title AIDS, the Other Pandemic it shows examples of activism in the experimental video and film made in conjunction with the AIDS epidemic: the vindication for the visibility of LGTBIQ+ desire in the face of the public authorities’ criminalisation of it; the media-created paranoia surrounding the disease; the involvement of the public sphere to fight the pandemic; the artist as an icon in the slogan “the personal is political”. Salient among collectives such as Gran Fury and artists such as Pepe Espaliú are Barbara Hammer, whose work replaces sight with tactile experience in her investigations of lesbian experimental film, and David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist whose work and life were an exercise in against-the-grain survival in Reagan’s America.
Force line: Contemporary Disturbances
Curator: Chema González
Date: from 26 June to 2 July, 2020
Lugar: Museo Reina Sofía’s Vimeo Channel
Access: free
The Pink Triangle project looks to consolidate a space of convergence between different agents working in the sphere of sexual diversity and gender in schools, aiming to develop, in accordance with the legislation in force, comprehensive programmes against LGTBIphobia and discrimination of sexual orientation and identity.
Two editions, Pink Triangle 1 and 2, held in July and October 2019 respectively, witnessed the exchange of methodology and practices between different types of programmes, for instance LGTBIQ+ tutoring, diversity classrooms, and so on. In order to prepare the programme’s return for the 2020–2021 school year and to celebrate LGTBIQ+ Pride, the Museo Reina Sofía shares this diagram, which was worked upon in previous editions and condenses the issues, urgencies and objectives explored.
In conjunction with the 2019 exhibition David Wojnarowicz. History Keeps Me Awake at Night, artist Diego del Pozo carried out the performance Untitled (Eroticism Casts Everything) in the form of a walk around the show. During the routes, participants read texts and statements from artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, embodying his voice through myriad other voices. This approach, which started from the question of how to love collectively under the fear of contact after the AIDS crisis, and also a meditation on how to celebrate love, friendship and eroticism, gains even greater weight in relation to a new health emergency like the present one.
The Library and Documentation Centre offers a virtual exhibition on a collaborative project propelled by the Museo entitled Queer Archive?: a documentary ensemble which, since its creation in 2012, has undergone numerous reactivations to collectively explore, from queer standpoints, the traditional notion of the archive. More specifically, the touchstone of the show is the activist struggle the queer movement developed in facing up to the AIDS pandemic in the 1990s in Madrid via collectives such as La Radical Gai and LSD. Thus, the materials and documents in the show suggest certain convergences, parallels and divergencies with the present health emergency, addressing questions such as the fear of infection, unfamiliarity with the illness, stigmatisation of the sick, the blame placed on certain collectives and minorities, the call for social responsibility and the demand for an emphatic and globalised institutional response.