Cloud Atlas is a wonderful film by the Wachowski sisters in which stories and characters unfold, mix and meet again across time, races and genders (sexual and film). The concept of trans is a notion that goes far beyond gender and has to do with the flow and transit between identities, formats, politics, languages or disciplines. Transit, transition, transformation.
The exhibition dedicated to Lorenza Böttner, curated by Paul B. Preciado at the Virreina is an example of the recovery of an exceptional artist who made transformation her strategy to express her point of view and to define her own identity. A documentary by Michael Stahlberg brings us closer to the personal circumstances of Ernst Lorenz Böttner, who at the age of eight is the victim of an accident after climbing a tree and grabbing onto a high-tension cable that results in the amputation of both arms. After her rehabilitation and refusal to assume a bodily standard through prosthetics, she was then able to explore through art a form of expression and her own identity, which included the transformation of her face through painting, of her feminine personality, Lorenza, and of her performance abilities. A student of Professor Harry Kramer at the Gesamthochschule in Kassel (how important is the role of a teacher, a tutor who knows how to point out the potential of his students without imposing himself!), she uses her circumstances and a very conscious exhibitionism as a means of expression to break away from the pigeonholing to which people with some kind of bodily dysfunction are subjected.
Lorenza Böttner paints with her feet and mouth, dances, performs, uses her face as a canvas, paints in the street, investigates and studies the notion of “freak”, is a model for photographers such as Joel-Peter Witkin or Robert Mapplethorpe, embodies classical models such as the Venus de Milo to highlight the canons of beauty of a mutilated body and travels the world. The exhibition does not focus particularly on her later years (her role as inspiration for Petra, the mascot created by Mariscal for the 1992 Barcelona Paralympic Games, or her early death due to complications from AIDS), but rather emphasises the celebration of idiosyncrasy and of an individual and differentiated expressiveness that reminds us of the meaning of trans: the freedom to define oneself, to invent and reinvent oneself, to express and present oneself freely and autonomously, outside (or against) pre-established standards. Trans means dialogue, confrontation, fluidity, tolerance. And, indirectly, it also reminds us that the 21st century, in all its complexity, will be trans or is in danger of being retrograde to limits that we will not be able to withstand.
[Article published in Bonart, 2019]
