Closing Night ✺

1. Porn meets freaks

The body as a political tool, sex as a weapon. This program opens the way to (post-)porn productions where male ejaculation is no longer the purpose of the fantastical projections produced on the female body. This time, whores, dykes, queers, freaks take the camera to divert the normative policies and their moralistic propriety.

2. Deep outside (Performance by bruce)

Diving into troubled waters: hydrophonic diving suit, scientific abyss. At the bottom of the water, on the skin. Carnival of the animals and freak show. Silver bodies meet silver bodies in a great pornographic hysteria. Reticules and tentacles, gonzootropes, click-clack. Contact.

Bodies like sex machines, against war machines. That vibrate and rumble under the ground, ready to jump, to explode, and to explode against the walls. It might as well be hard, it might as well be raw, without restraint. Let all the forbidden gestures spring forth, from as many detained bodies. Between these walls that limit, delimit, structure, and map physical and psychic territories: the territories of our dispossessed, helpless bodies, rendered impotent by a system of intervention, exploitation and extraction. They erect themselves proudly, like flags stating their own laws, to say your rights. The rights to be or not to be, in this place, or to stay in that one. “Stay there, always in your place, straight.

Those who dictate your way, from their voice. So many voices that camouflage the bodies, that block the throat, that choke the pores of your skin. Voices that project themselves in images, fruit of fantasies colonizing minds and bodies. They come to register as many identities inappropriate to our alienated subjectivities. And to defend themselves against any resistance, to protect themselves from any disobedience, the visual narratives of our sexual liberations had to be quickly mastered.
Pornography became a political tool denigrating our individual sensibilities, dictating the laws of our desires, controlling the images produced on our bodies, on our sexes and our sexualities.
Dirty were those who were represented, because liberated, but always more despised and marginalized. We had to answer by the good behaviour, by the restraint of our desires, and to say us, of our pleasures.
The pornography became then obscene (ob/scene): its place will be off stage. The photographic technology was added like a new means to capture and seize us, henceforth objects that one sexualizes, that one eroticizes. We animate and activate them under the movement of the camera. A continuous movement, an endless coming and going. An unperturbed frenzy like a talking sex.
Elsewhere, others have found a way to capture the image and transform the stigma. Obscene is the image. Obscene is what is off-stage and staged. Obscene is the porn because it puts naked… Naked are from now on all these glances which have bandaged on our bodies, on our sexes. All these projected fantasies and these voices that have spoken too much, that are displayed, exposed, to finally leave room for our own subjectivities and our animated desires.
Our bodies, our sexes, our sexualities are so many political fictions to expose, to explode, so many visions to confront and confront. To jostle, to disturb, to burst and especially to burst.

To take pleasure and to enjoy. To fuck through all the holes and to speak badly. At the risk of being dirty, filthy… Spreading our filth.
Always unfit and unclean, oozing and stinking. Abject and indecent subjects against these dominant, self-righteous and well-behaved people.
From our bodies on fire, burning under the nitrate… tongues are loosening, throats are unfolding, lips are getting wet and speech is turning into spittle of filth that ejects the abject products of politics…
We have swallowed these words, to cure our ills.
Then we will choose to become… Whores, bitches, dykes, faggots, queers, leather, freaks. Because “our sex is a weapon loaded with mercury” and the enemy is waiting to fuck us. 1

—
Apolline/Lawrence Diaz

Parallel future
Silent spring
Tentacles grown
On the body

 

Science fiction
Science freak show

Deviance friction

Deep outside proposes a queer and feminist re-reading of powers/knowledge produced through technologies of seeing. It is a certain history of the gaze. That of the dominant on the dominated. From Charcot and the photographic obsession with hysterical showgirls, to Cousteau’s bathyscaphes and the transparency of Painlevé’s aquariums, it is a dive into the depths that takes place. 20,000 leagues under the sea, 20,000 probes in the bodies.

Hidden behind the lens or the glass, scalpel or tweezers in hand, sheltered in submarines, lamp pointed at blinded eyes or unexplored depths, the scientist masters the gaze. Producing objects of knowledge, he exhibits creatures that have no power over their image. Close-ups, zooms, microscopy. Measurements, tests, nosographies. White and patriarchal science classifies and manufactures otherness in a chain.

By focusing on the production of femininity and animality through these optical devices, Deep outside proposes to re-view filmic bodies. To reiterate these images is to rearrange them, to repeat them in order to make them foreign to themselves. This difference in the repetition is a queer gesture of detour: it is not a question of reproducing but of untying, rereading. This palimpsest invites us to imagine utopias by decentering the gaze.

Writing History: why? for whom? There are so many stories to tell, so many films to make. Deep outside takes the challenge of science fiction to go through these scientific fictions. To imagine the film and the writing as a utopia in progress, the production of other spaces, of outside spaces that multiply. To pervert the harshness of science by the evanescence of fiction, to think the horizon rather than the deep. For the ephemeral community of a movie theater.

—
bruce

It is through his activism in associations fighting against AIDS that bruce meets queer and feminist theories and practices. He is also an activist in his work as a filmmaker, and is committed to bringing to life minoritized cultures, characters and bodies that are often invisible in fictional projects. His taste for counter-cultures and genre cinema leads him to mix his political concerns with aesthetic issues that are often marginalized. Director of 7 short films, he is currently writing several queer genre film projects. Co-creator of the Shemale Trouble trans parties, he is also a resident DJ for the Mouillette collective.
It is as a trans person that he sets up creative devices where the voiceless take the floor, where the abnormal regain power over their body and their image. Deep outside is a story among others, a thread that weaves and writes hybrid imaginaries.