Film Program #5: Feminisms & Sexual Dissidences

 

Reception to follow.

Feminisms and Sexual Dissidences is an experimental short film and video

program in which queer, trans, and feminist subjects reckon with the particular impact of authoritarianism–both during and after the dictatorship–on sexual minorities and women, as well as these subjects’ resistance to the dictatorship. Programmed by Carl Fischer, José Miguel Palacios, and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto.

This is the last in a series of five film programs titled “Archives for the Future.” The series seeks to reactivate, reappropriate, and repoliticize the cinematic memory of the Chilean coup. It establishes dialogues between works made throughout the last five decades at different historical moments—from the socialist years of Allende, to the dictatorship, post-dictatorship, and the estallido social or “social explosion” in 2019.

Jorge Díaz is a Chilean writer, biologist, and activist. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Biology at University College, London, where he studies the non-canonical mechanism of neural crest cell migration. He is a former member of the University Collaborative for Sexual Dissidence (known by its Spanish-language acronym CUDS), which carried out a number of performances questioning prevailing norms in Chile about gender and sexuality. These included Anxious for Publicity, which was included in this series. He is also the author of numerous books including Microscopio invertido (Inverted Microscope), an autobiographical/poetic account of his experience as a queer researcher in science, Emancipar la lágrima (The Emancipation of Tears), Inflamadas de retórica. Escrituras promiscuas para una tecno-decolonialidad (Inflamed with Rhetoric: Promiscuous Writings towards Techno-Decoloniality), and Ojos que no ven (Look Not with the Eyes), co-written with the photographer Paz Errázuriz.

Cheril Linett is a Chilean performance artist, actress, and director. She has participated in a number of conferences and festivals, but her primary work has taken place independently, in public spaces. She began her artistic career in 2015, and since 2017 she has worked on the project Yeguada Latinoamericana, a performance group that has done multiple works, including “Order and Homeland,” included in this film series, as well as “Choreography of Suction,” “Water Poetics,” “Funereal Currents,” and “Home.” She has participated in a number of collective exhibits in Chile and Germany, and she has held artistic residencies in Argentina and Spain. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museo C.A.V. La Neomudéjar in Madrid, entitled “Del cuerpo a la carne” (“From the Body to the Flesh”). She is the author of two books: Yeguada Latinoamericana de Cheril Linett and Anarcografías del Cuerpo (both from Trío Editorial, 2021), which include compilations of photos and texts from her work. Her performances focus on questioning the assumptions underlying femininity, feminism, and motherhood, and highlight the ways in which violence against women was justified by police, not only in the present but also during the dictatorship