Max*ine Vajt's "Courtney Adams // Adam Curtis as a trans* girls method" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on July 29th, 2023 as one of 19 AEROPONIC ACTS of WHERE THE MOON IS UP curated by Elisa Giuliani.

Here you will find the documentation of Max*ine Vajt's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Giulia Crispiani and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.

Courtney Adams // Adam Curtis as a trans* girls method

Max*ine Vajt's question: What do a collapse of a union and girl dick have in common?

Max*ine's introduction: A caricature of an American soldier as avatar, an old-school hard Czech cop with his Slovak sidekick wearing way too much tweed and a tranny walk into a bar. A start of a bad joke or
a transmigration on the axis of pre/post 2008, east/west, male/female? The disjuncture
between the discursive parameters of embodiment and the material relations of the body, language and materiality, the state and its collapse, are however more complicated. Does not mean you can’t joke about it though...

Giulia's report: The author gives us a brief introduction: the story begins with an interactive 1984 tv program in Czechoslovakia, where by turning the light on and off the audience could make binary choices. In 1999, the most peaceful revolution in the eastern block. Then a video plays with vintage footage, then military 3d animation and references and then a pop song repeats the title and a QR code that sends us to a video game to play on our phones—“do you remember the smell of old VHS tape? The editing room is a sacred space—ghost and others come out of the machine—eerie sound like a white noise”—the sound we anticipate from others people phones, some moving image, we make choices and get into a specific context—“once you start you cannot go back. Courtney is the audience”—“some sets their audio too loud, there’s nothing more 90s than a bad speaker.—the sexologist decides to cut the body in half—detransistioning before transitioning. TV and state, Vaclav Klaus.—old man stays in power as The Boy has been selected as the more reliable expert of desire”—At the end big screen goes on again and some footage of Czech TV. 

Phanuel Antwi I think of the word transmigration, which has colonial and medical, disease connotation. I was interested in this idea of separation of the state between the public and the private. The collapse of the personal desire and the state desire, when those two collapse: the state sexologist, what is that? What are both and what are they trying to do? Governance and governamentality. Crononormativity and queerness as the norm. The queerness and transness as the state, imaging a world where we are the world.

Ayesha Hameed The composition is very well orchestrated. Fragmentation of the state, and a body and the state as a body. Fragmentation, dissolution. My relationship to the content, related to the its form. Through this thematic, I chose my own adventure, mine was about the body and sexology, and my sense of alienation was very strong. How you took something analog and digitize it, and then took the body and made it static the queering of the video. Life can be stranger than fiction, when you see a state collapsing. Scale in relation to affect, sometimes more is more, the smaller the thing the greater the affect, despite the fragmentation the experience was extremely immersive.

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi You work mostly on the disposif, I felt it was a sort of relocation, the most challenging part of your work, you overturned the scene creating this co-existence of people watching this, and the overlap the sounds and screens in our intimacy. I appreciate your initial presence, very coherent with the rest of the piece, and the aesthetic coherence of the relocation of tape into digital world, in resonance to another kind of transition.

This passage between big and small screen, it’s what happens with cinema, it was great to notice how the perception is changing also in terms of collective and singular particular mediatic dimension. How the aesthetic of the images expressed these different temporality between East and West, the aesthetic gap that still divides Europe. I think of“My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” by Olia Lialina—similar montage and participated editing.

About Max*ine Vajt

Max*ine's introduction to 'Courtney Adams // Adam Curtis as a trans* girls method' in italiano