Fotograf Zone – Andrea Long Chu

According to Andrea Long Chu, who has been said to have launched the second wave of trans studies, we are all female and we all hate it. Being female in Chu’s sense is defined as a psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another, hence femaleness is neither an anatomical nor genetic characteristic but a universal existential condition. Females is a fast read, full of unpredictable arguments that feel as substantiated as they are provocative. Drawing from multifarious cultural and philosophical references such as Valerie Solana’s musings, the Matrix, Lacanian psychoanalysis or castration anxiety, we do not need to agree with Chu’s meditations on desire, transness or feminism, but we had better be ready to have our ground shift.

Text: Laura Amann

Laura Amann

is a curator and architect living and working in Vienna. Currently she is a curator at Kunsthalle Wien alongside the WHW collective. Amann is the co-founder of Significant Other, a project space and curatorial platform concerned with the overlaps of art and architecture. More recent projects look at madness and insanity as forms of knowledge, and sensuality and how they produce spaces for disobedience.

#39 Delight, Pain

e feel like revising our relationships. This time, relationships between people. Relationships between genders whose borders are not as firm as we might have thought until recently – instead, they are entirely permeable. Society responds to non-binary or transformative identities in various ways: with sexism, vehement exclusion, hidden exclusion, glass ceilings or attempts at inclusion. The proportion of these forces is constantly developing and changing and we decided to focus on them, and not alone. We opted for an experiment, and invited, as guest editors, the collective of the studio of New Aesthetics at the Department of Photography at FAMU, Prague: Nikol Czuczorová, Nikolaj Jessen, Andrej Kiripolský, Zuzana-Markéta Macková, Tobias Páral, Ezra Šimek, Leevi Toija, Max Vajt and Hynek Alt with Jen Kratochvil. This collaboration broadened our perspective to include the age group of those currently studying. Together, we arrived not only at the result of the printed issue but also at a new form of digital content – a series of podcasts and videos. Our guests helped sensitize and materialize the themes depicted on the mental map they created when conceiving the issue, lobbying for a revision of our established perception of the selected aggregate that forms the backbone of the magazine’s content: pleasure, pain, chaos, jouissance, anxiety, responsibility, orgasm, non-binary language, activism, perversion, social experiment. The chain of association can continue as you browse the pages of the magazine or listen to the podcasts, whose considerable ambition is to use the spoken word to discuss visual art. It will be delight accompanied by pain – otherwise it would not be delight at all.