What Might Be Bullets, Fireworks, or Balloons: Repertoires of More than Survival in Cassils's 103 Shots and Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen Harris's Brotherhood, Crossroads and Etcetera 1994

Figure 1.

Still from 103 Shots. Cassils, 103 Shots, 2016. Single channel video with sound, runtime 2:35 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

In June 2016 Cassils wrote of their inspiration for their newest work, 103 Shots: "Following the recent mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, I was struck by the testimony of one of the survivors, a man who said one of the reasons he did not react immediately to the gunshots was that he initially perceived them as the celebratory noises of 'fireworks or balloons popping.'"¹ In the context of 2016 San Francisco Pride, fewer than two weeks after the Pulse massacre, Cassils gathered over 200 volunteer performers to stage 103 Shots in San Francisco's Dolores Park. In the short black and white film, over the accelerating pops of what might be bullets, fireworks, or balloons, we listen to and watch bodies come into contact over Cristy Michel's soundtrack of echoing cement, pulsing synthesizer, and whirling helicopter blades.

At first, in the camera's tightness, we can only apprehend sudden jerks of torso skin. As the brutal sound continues to intensify in its repetition, the camera moves outward to reveal the faces of its participants and the bulging surfaces of balloons jammed between their bodies. In brief flashing video clips, we witness these performers endeavor to stretch and slam each balloon to its obliviating breaking point. One couple harnesses the exploding energy of the pop to thrust their hips into forceful collision. Another holds their lips together tightly in staunch refusal of being torn away as the force of the bursting latex briefly expands the space between their chests. A couple giggles in embarrassment as they wait to embrace their balloon; an outstretched arm slaps what might be a satin sheet, or merely the photographer's backdrop; shirtless folks pose defiantly in the feathered capes, leather straps, and striped suspenders of Pride.

When members of this forum first gathered to discuss Cassils's work, I was most struck by the ways that Cassils demands alternatives to the representationalism of our most visible queer and trans political appeals. In the visual culture of these mainstream LGBTQ political deployments, images of queer and trans people function symbolically: visual codes of queerness are tasked to reveal something essential about queer interiorities with the attendant promise that public confession in the form of visibility will set us free. As others within this forum note, Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton unpack a cruel and fundamental irony of trans representation within their edited volume Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility: given that the oft-lauded "transgender tipping point" simultaneously marks a rise in anti-trans violence, only those who are already primed to benefit from white, middle-class, and able-bodied normativities are positioned to thrive when visuality is configured as the "primary path" to political justice.²

In the context of a diverse set of public mournings of the Pulse tragedy—a public execution of mostly queer, mostly Latinx men—identity emerges not through the kinds of individual enunciations of internal truths that might be acutely apprehended by a camera but through tactical repertoires of survival: embodied techniques of traversing risky terrains of visibility and belonging. If 103 Shots reminds us to think about enactments of identity differently, it is precisely in the way Cassils captures ongoing and unsettled processes of emergence that are pervaded, but not fully determined, by the threat and consummation of violence. In this article, I attend to 103 Shots as documentary footage of such processes of becoming as a strategic form of minoritarian performance. I move from my reading of 103 Shots to Brotherhood, Crossroads and Etcetera 1994, a triptych of photographs by Lyle Ashton Harris in collaboration with his brother Thomas Allen Harris.³ Here, in a series of three still frames, the...