Tranifest: Queer Futures
- Tranifest: Queer Futures
Ones and zeroes spread now to reach every nook and cranny. No secret. Know everything. But what about spirit? Invisible power? The depth of the universe within our collective soul? Let us start all over. Imagine a world possible. If violence can become the norm, so can justice. If profit can trump life, so can love. The world is what we make it. And we make it with film. Manifest. Tran(sform)ifest. We create films in the service of transformation. In the legacy of one-room shacks where enslaved women taught people to read for the sake of their physical freedom, WE open doors with all that we have access to today.
Let us use our cameras to build our communities, strong, healthy, and with joy.
The camera is a tool, and we can use it in various ways. The camera in the grip of someone else’s hand has taken by force the stories, songs, visions, dreams, [End Page 568] and conversations of a community. We have seen this happen before, our stories, our spaces excavated as the cameraperson asks for something authentic, something real, something black. We must take back the camera not simply to create our own stories but to prove that there are indeed other ways of being and knowing that challenge the notions of a pathological native, just waiting to be understood before the dominant gaze.
We must show the fantastic is not only possible but also desirable for those of us who deeply seek change for our new world and ourselves.
We honor filmmaking as a spiritual practice. We reveal the dissonance that has become invisible within white supremacy and capitalism.
We create film within a black feminist legacy and toward a future that is accountable to queer people of color. We are making love. And when love is what you are making, there will always be enough.
Julia R. Wallace creates media and art intended to heal and transform. Julia is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, musician, composer, and theologian. Julia founded Queer Renaissance, a multimedia movement based on the premise that we can create the world anew; cocreated, with Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Black Feminist Film School and Mobile Homecoming, a national intergenerational experiential archive project that seeks to amplify generations of black LGBTQ brilliance by using multimedia and building intergenerational family of choice across time and space.
Kai M. Green is a filmmaker and a spoken word poet who examines through film and poetry questions of gendered and racialized violence. His most recent film, It Gets Messy in Here, is a thirty-two-minute short that examines the lives of transgender men and masculine-identified women of color and their bathroom experiences. Kai is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is writing a dissertation that will serve as one historical/ethnographic account of black LGBT lives in Los Angeles. Kai is committed to creating consciousness-raising art and scholarship.
