{"id":221,"date":"2026-04-28T18:35:27","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T18:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/petratotten.com\/blog\/?p=221"},"modified":"2026-04-28T18:35:27","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T18:35:27","slug":"notes-towards-isolation-on-installing-trans-film-tactics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/petratotten.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/notes-towards-isolation-on-installing-trans-film-tactics\/","title":{"rendered":"NOTES TOWARDS ISOLATION: On Installing Trans Film Tactics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Abstract<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This research-creation project offers a view into video installation as a liberatory tactic away from tired engagements with so-called \u2018positive representation. This work outlines my proposed gallery exhibition that isolates cinematic tactics in order to uncover specific ways in which trans embodiment and life experience can be centered when creating images of and for trans life. I envision this installation being a site of both collective creation and future engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Artist Statement<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, amid widespread reckoning with the racist and imperialist histories wrapped up in Confederate war memorials in the United States, trans artist and activist Tourmaline divined a plan to convert Riker\u2019s Island into what she named the Nanny Goat Hill Pleasure Garden. The collage and speculative plan went on to inspire her 2020 show Pleasure Garden<\/em>, a photo and video installation working through some of the same ideas of futurity, livelihood, and creation. In her original write-up of the project, she imagines Nanny Goat Hill Pleasure Garden as a \u201cblueprint for possibility,\u201d a framing I was struck by as I was researching the breadth of her work. The work in this proposal lies in similar fashion as a blueprint for possibility, one intertwined in the making of trans images and the liberatory possibility of the moving and installed image. Though I see this as a stand-alone project, I hope that the open-endedness of the eventual work and the conversations and activations around them will work in similar speculative fashion to forge new ideas and connections within and between trans artist<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this installation, I will be isolating 3-5 cinematic\/ documentary film techniques in order to explore the ways in which those techniques can connect and intermingle with various ways of trans+ life-building and experience. Some examples I\u2019m thinking of are the gaze in documentary, the use of interviews, repetition, duration, and montage. Each video piece will isolate one technique like this, and I will be installing it with the support of Charles Street Video\u2019s MakerSpace program in their gallery in September 2026. In isolating various nonfiction forms to reveal how trans+ life reflects within those forms, this installation will help me present future possibilities within a larger research project on embodied trans poetics in nonfiction film, and how it can possibly guide future practitioners in altering the benchmarks for liberatory trans+ images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Critical Introduction<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The central ideas theoretically underpinning this project have primarily come from Catharine Russell\u2019s Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video <\/em>(1999). Russell astutely connects the histories of both ethnographic film and experimental film, noting specific ways in which both modes of creation inform one another, and what can be gained from viewing visual ethnographies through theories of the avant-garde. Throughout the book Russell uses the particular reading of ethnography through experimental film as a formalistic exercise that promises to offer alternative routes through ethnography to \u201cdeconstruct the apparatus of power\u201d (Russell, 1999, 125). Focusing on surrealism, the centrality of the body, self-making, and the possibilities of ecstasy, destruction, and so-called primitive cinema, she effectively shifts the reader\u2019s view of the apparatus of power that often upholds the colonial project through othering and visual subjugation. As I prepare and plan what I will be recording and who I will be collaborating with, my mainstay is this shining insight from Eliza Steinbock from their incredible book Shimmering Images<\/em>: \u201cCinema as a discrete aesthetic form presents a golden opportunity for staging disjunction.\u201d Such disjunction reflects a trans+ sensibility in the ways these images are created and presented, and throughout this project I am working to find that space in the nodes of connection between nonfiction film practices and material trans+ theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the pages to follow I will focus on repetition as one of many possibilities for cinematic tactics to consider. If documentary is a practice of intimacy (after Katie Kirkland\u2019s luxuriating probe of Emily Jacir\u2019s 2019 film Letter to a Friend<\/em>), then repetition may act as this intimacy revealed. Re-visiting a movement or individual reflects an attention akin to hierarchies of scale in art history, yet in the linear medium of video time replaces scale in importance. Kirkland asserts that documentary is a practice of affinity, rather than a concrete genre or mode of filmmaking. This focus on affinity helps me attune my feelings towards what draws me rather than what may make logistic sense. To that end, I\u2019ve had the idea of these images lodged in my mind for years \u2013which my time-stamped card on my dissertation Trello board can confirm was added one month after starting my degree in 2022. This coincides with a reading of a Gilles Deleuze interview titled \u201cThe Brain is the Screen\u201d in the fifth week of an installation course. Ever interested in parsing the specific experiences of the cinema (\u201cThe image itself is an ensemble of time relations from the present which merely flows, either as a common multiple, or as the smallest divisor<\/em>,\u201d emphasis mine), a quip of taste lodged itself in my mind: \u201cThe cinema doesn’t reproduce bodies, it produces them with grains that are the grains of time.\u201d (Flaxman, 2000, 371; ibid, 372). Grains of time, bodies in a flowing present, smaller and smaller divisions of images until we arrive at the smallest unit of measure. And then, too, what lies beyond that? Repetition is one way in which things can be revealed in cinema, and considering this technique within installation brings out a wider variety of possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visual Notes: Test Shoot<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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