t4t

Gems Wang

School of Film/Video – MFA1 – Film/Video

Collaborators: Jeffrey Martín (Intimacy Coordinator), Trisha Bhattacharya (Cinematography), Ember Streshinsky (Assistant Director), Colleen Boken (Performer), Jay Routh (Performer), Elliott Shepherd (Performer)

A monitor hangs face-down from a network of steel cables, low enough to conceal a 36-minute durational film featuring the growing intimacy of three trans strangers from passers-by.

Trans love is the awkward earnestness of play, the specificity of communication over assumption, and the rejection of the cis-hetero-masculine-normative understanding of love as weakness, performance, competition, or violence. Trans love creates hidden, intimate, supportive spaces within a hostile world that views trans beauty as something to fetishize, invade, and destroy. Trans love is subveillance.

This site-specific video installation is located in a high-traffic, high-visibility public area. However, the area beneath the monitor is secluded and intimate, with enough room for two people lying on the floor. To see the film, the audience must trespass upon this private trans space, kneeling, clambering, and squeezing their bodies into submissive positions in full public view.

Documentation of the film is intentionally scarce to uphold its intimate, subveillant nature.

Many collaborators made this work possible:

Featuring

Colleen Boken

Jay Routh

Elliott Shepherd

Intimacy Coordinator

Jeffrey Martín (mar-TEEN)

Cinematography

Trisha Bhattacharya

Assistant Director

Ember Streshinsky