With reference to a performance of Michel Journiac, the main artist of French body art, who died in 1995 and who proclaimed:

The body is the locus of all the brandings, all the wounds, all the traces. The tortures, the social classes’ taboos, the violence of powers dispersed but never abolished are imprinted on the flesh. Only the outcasts create nowadays. Because it is their bodies speaking, expressing the refusal. Because this is their bodies who speak, who state the refusal. Bodies of refusal, non-purchased sold bodies, condemned bodies, prostitute bodies, tortured bodies, body work instrument, queer bodies, drug addict bodies, alcoholic bodies, sick bodies. All culture is this Third-excluded.

This program offers a story of gay, lesbian, queer and trans bodies empowered through experimental & activist
cinema and artist videos; it includes contemporary and rarely screened historic productions from the 1980s.

—Kantuta Quiros & Aliocha Imhoff, guest curators.
TRT: 78 min.
Mama no me lo dijo, episode 1
Mujeres Creando, 2003, Bolivia, video, color, sound (without words), 8 min. US Premiere
“Crazy people, agitators, rebels, disobedients, subversives, witches, street, grafiteras, anarchists, feministas, lesbians and heterosexuals; married and unmarried; students and clerks; Indians, chotas, cholas, birlochas, and señoritas; old and young; white and coloured, we are a fabric of solidarities; of identities, of commitments, we are women, WOMEN CREATING.” —Mujeres Creando
Acciones, episode 6
Mujeres Creando, 2001, Bolivia, video, color, sound, Spanish w/English subtitles, 12 min. US Premiere
Acciones is gathering a serial of street actions between art and politics. The episode is a lesbian love declaration by the unique openly lesbian couple of Bolivia.
Action de corps exclus
Michel Journiac & Gérard Cairaschi, 1983, France, video, color, sound, French w/English subtitles, 15 min.
“The body is the locus of all the brandings, all the wounds, all the traces. The tortures, the social classes’ taboos, the violence of powers dispersed but never abolished are imprinted on the flesh. Only the outcast create nowadays. Because it is their bodies speaking, expressing the refusal” (Excerpt from the text read by Michel Journiac at the beginning of the action). An action which took place in 1983 at the Pompidou Center, during which Michel Journiac publicly brands himself on the arm with a red-hot iron triangle, the mark of the outcast.
Last Night I took a Man...
David Wojnarowicz & Marion Scemama, 1989-2004, France, video, color, sound (without words), English, 3 min. NY Premiere.
Filmmaker and artist David Wojnarowicz used his art as a polemical tool with which to indict those he held responsible for the AIDS epidemic and to document his own suffering. David Wojnarowicz is a well-known New York artist, but this video directed by his French friend Marion Scemama has never been screened in NY.

1/2 Frösche Ficken Flink
Hans Scheirl & Ursula Pürrer, 1992-96, Austria, 16mm, color, sound (without words), 17 min
Hans Scheirl, filmmaker of the cult movie Dandy Dust, some years earlier directed with Ursula Purrer a few splendid super-8 films for a hermaphrodite and transgender cinema that occupy the space between actionist cinema, trash movie, lesbian and queer porn, cross gender and cyborg identities.

Summer 1992, NYC: Scheirl’s first feature-film Flaming Earsis opening the 'New Festival' at the 8th Street Playhouse. Dietmar and Hans are staying with 'Shi-zu' in the Lower East Side. Elke comes to visit. Hans and Elke fuck on the roof, 'Shi-zu' examines holes, Dietmar jumps in the wig, Zande is boxing in a gym in Brooklyn: 'Shi-zu' watches, Hans is filming.

Winter 1993, London. Si.Si. visits Hans. Si.Si., Suzie and Hans are filming obscene games (handstand, frankfurter, uniform). Sadly, the filmed footage is lost. (H.S.)
Ruins
Raphaël Vincent & Ruins production, 2004-2006, France, video, color, sound (without words), 23 min. US Premiere
Ruins is the trace of a long journey through Western Europe in various autonomous queer communities. Neither documentary nor fiction, Ruins searches systems of image production to update identities that escape from the eye of the system. It’s in the ruins that are our objects, fragments of gender, scattered pieces of our stories, bits of sex, blurred images. It should have to invent scenes, attitudes and performances. To reappropriate ourself. The houses as skeletons around us, waste and the rest. Concrete as a friend. The pieces of glass sparkle.