[ISEA2022] Artist Talk: Diego Marchante — Gendernaut: Queering the future

Artists Statement 

Second Summit on New Media Art Archiving
June 10, MACBA – Convent dels Àngels. Artist Talk.

Keywords: archive, future, performance, queer, time travel

Gendernaut is a trans-temporal and trans-spatial traveler who invites us to travel through an LGTBI and feminist genealogy. It shows us the archive through a transmedia and performative experience to reveal how the future has been represented from a transfeminist and queer perspective.

Gendernaut is an English term that we could translate as “navigator of gender”, and that invokes Jason’s argonauts. The term appears for the first time in the documentary Gendernauts: A Journey through shifting identities (1999), directed by Monika Treut, to refer to people who travel through shifting gender identities.

This artistic research project questions, in a first phase entitled “Queering the software”, the forms of construction of the hegemonic archive through the design of a plugin that allows the collective creation of archives through an online interactive multimedia experience and, in a second phase entitled “Queering the archive”, proposes new ways of visualizing narratives based on transfeminist and queer genealogies through transmedia and performative experiences that conceive the archive as a living interactive space, free of heteropatriarchal codes, inhabited by multiple bodies and subjectivities that relate past, present and future to come. The series articulates an extensive historical investigation through a diversity of thematic threads that the feminist, queer and trans movements have been weaving during the last four decades in our political and artistic context. These genealogies link a whole series of historical, artistic, collective events, actions, campaigns, exhibitions, interviews, fanzines, performances, etc. forming a complex amalgam of relationships between art, politics, memory and activism.

Gendernaut is a trans-temporal and trans-spatial traveler that will invite us to travel through time through a genealogy of key events in the memory of the feminist movement and the LGTBI movement in our context. During this journey, he will show us the archive through a transmedia and performative experience to understand how the representation of the future in history has been imagined from a transfeminist and queer perspective. Queering the future… http://gendernaut.net

  • Diego Marchante is a transfeminist activist, transmedia artist and lecturer. Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, since 2008 he works as a professor of Audiovisuals and Gender Studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona. In 2011 he published “Archive T. A transfeminist and queer archive”, an archive of social movements and artistic practices that have addressed gender issues in the Spanish context from a queer and transfeminist perspective. His work has been exhibited at Can Felipa, Caixaforum, Fabra i Coats, Sala d’Art Jove, Centre de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. In 2020-21 his project, “Gendernaut. Queering the 90’s”, was selected in the call for research stays at the MNCARS, in the context of the project Our Many Europes – Europe’s critical 90s and The Constituent Museum.