Page 47 - "he 2020 Guggenheim issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

They gather and develop these different modes of with the presentation of her film Trem em Transe
interrogating the internalized ableist paradigms [Train in Trance] (2019). Its protagonist is Simone, a
that currently determine our understanding of how self-styled transvestite who embodies eagerness to
particular human bodies are meant to perform and reverse the intolerable level of social abandonment
produce. In the archive exhibition Practices of Radical that she had experienced. Simone was “reborn” in
Health Care (2018–ongoing) they look into the past- the person of pastor Sergio Santos after an overdose-
West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s - and present provoked “revelation.” The staples of a previous life,
feminist and healthcare movements linked to radical crack and prostitution, were exorcised as part of a
therapy, antipsychiatry, and queer self-care as a long-standing cure. In her home country of Brazil, the
means of developing collective methods and tools for life expectancy of transgender people is about 35
dealing with the crises that surround us. The FHCRG years. For these human beings in distress, mysticism
not only asks how to create communal self-organized and spiritualism are used as a way of achieving
feminist support structures but also proposes shared care and affection. Nevertheless, the robes of Neo-
vulnerability as a weapon and power of soft collective Pentecostal liturgy are unable to contain the ancestral
bodies. vibration of Candomblé. While despair has overtaken
the entire body, it has not yet dissolved its bindings
Virginia de Medeiros with the territory. The tremor that yields the trance
Over the course of two decades, Virginia de Medeiros’s ends up giving way to an indomitable lust for life.
artistic experimentation has embraced the desire for As the camera enters into the circular movements
a collective revolution of a social, political, and sexual made famous by Glauber Rocha’s 1960s Cinema Novo,
scope. A militant in the field of queer subjectivity, Medeiros prefers to move around and forgo allegory
Medeiros starts a three-month residency in Berlin as a way of directly challenging the open veins of
fanaticism.

exp. 2: Virginia de Medeiros – Feminist Health Care Research Group, exp. 2: Virginia de Medeiros – Feminist Health Care Research Group,
30.11.2019–8.2.2020, 11th Berlin Biennale c/o ExRotaprint 30.11.2019–8.2.2020, 11th Berlin Biennale c/o ExRotaprint
Installation view. Photo: Mathias Völzke Installation view. Photo: Mathias Völzke

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