Program by Alberto García del Castillo with produtions from Vídeo-Nou.

A program comprised of two videos by the collective Video-Nou (Barcelona, 1976-83): Actuació d’Ocaña i Camilo and Ocaña. Exposició a la Galería Mec-Mec (1977) portray Andalusian, anarchist, artist, thespian and cross-dresser Ocaña, his best-friend Camilo, the underground cartoonist Nazario, the camera operators, and more people reporting their work and lives, reciting, singing, dancing, making themselves up, and hanging out together. Projected along with the reading of a selection of passages containing Esther Newton’s portrayals of Tiger, Billy, Tris, Godiva, Lola, Jim, Jean, Dodi Turner, Bo Sutter, Wanda, Jane, Judy, Gus, Tim, Bonnie and others, and their specific political setting, in her essay Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972). 

Writer and curator Alberto García del Castillo composed this program and wrote the English subtitles – together with Liz Allan – for the videos of Video-Nou. At Arts Santa Mònica he will be reading excerpts from the original text by Esther Newton beside some parts of María José Belbel Bullejos and Paloma Uría’s translation to Spanish: Mother Camp: Un estudio de los transformistas femeninos en los Estados Unidos (2016).

This program was produced by Hamaca (Barcelona), premiered at Beursschouwburg in Brussels in September 2016 and presented at 1646 in The Hague in November.

Video-Nou was a collective formed in 1977, two years later becoming the management team of the Servei de Video Comunitari, which was conceived as a public service collective. Its members came from all areas of journalism, sociology, anti-psychiatry, education, the visual and performing arts and architecture. The group pioneered the use of portable Video equipment in Spain, with the idea of starting up some kind of counter-informative, activist TV station, rooted in specific conceptual art practices and institutional criticism.

Alberto García del Castillo writes genre fiction and non-fiction on communities and queer, plays those and other people’s writings, and collaborates with others in multiple combinations; he will soon launch Merman, and has published “Oslo” in Girls Like Us magazine, Midpoint and Retrospective. He has recently curated La Kermesse héroïque at Beursschouwburg and Pollination. Pansies. at NICC, both in Brussels; and beside Marnie Slater is the co-curator of Buenos Tiempos, Int.

Esther Newton is a cultural anthropologist best known for her pioneering work on the ethnography of lesbian and gay communities in the United States. She has published two books: Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972) and Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty years in America’s first gay and lesbian town (1993).

 

English and Spanish / 90 min.

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HAMACA

 

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Arts Santa Mònica