WHAT IS GENDEROTICA

 

GendErotica  - contaminazioni di arte queer is a project that started in 2009 and happens biannually. Year after year it is growing fast in terms of contents, artists, spaces, works and Italian premieres.

Genderotica is a real self-managed and self-produced festival that happens because  of the steadfastness of Eyes Wild Drag and is supported by a network of associations, movements, collectives   nvolved in a rich and imaginative exchange. There is also a collaboration with Teatro Valle Occupato and Nuovo Cinema Palazzo in 2013, where the festival edition was dedicated to queer femininity. 

Taking place over three days, GendErotica presents shows, performance art, exhibits of photography, paintings and installations, screening of shorts and documentaries, workshops. The great majority of involved artists have never presented their work in Italy.

GendErotica aims to reflect on Gender representations from a queer perspective, redesigning the deconstruction map of genders from social, political, cultural and erotic point of view, and with an eye on what is happening around gender outside of Italy.

The initial inspiration for the festival was to build an event in which figurative and performance arts would ignite discussion about the queer body  – through the senses, with joy and passion –  refusing the claustrophobic and exhausting normative representations. A vital queer body speaking of freedom and the joy of transformation!  We believe that a vital, political and artistic at the same time, assertive festival, like Genderotica, is a great chance to create alternative, non-aligned, non-commercialized new  visionaries that reject and take position against the Gender binary and conformism to any mainstream systemender binary and conformism to any mainstream system

 

 

GENDEROTICA 2015 IS... COMING!

 

GendErotica 2015 is the necessary and inevitable step after “GendErotica 2013: Fem.” The visions, contradictions and imaginary that came out from last edition have defined the topics of the incoming edition of this festival.

It's clear from the community response that related to Quer feminity is difficult, especially as long as we have to face feminine-hetero-normative concepts and prejudices. This contradiction opens a question on what might be legitimately queer.

We will not dictate the definitions of what is queer, what is legitimate to be considered as queer, whose bodies belong to queer experience, what is supposed to be “your” meaning of queer.

Queer starts from the internal experience, each one has its own unique personal experience, starting from oneself, which stands in opposition to any kind of conformity.

 Body, eroticism and sexuality are effective tools to deconstruct any image that each of us creates for ourselves. These are some of the fields where social stigma operates to prevent individual free choice and self-determination of the body. That's why, we’re particularly interested to talk about eroticism, pornography, femmes, trans, sex workers, feminism, desires, fantasies, imaginaries moving out from different points of view, also including those artists that are not coming from queer scene but identify themselves in a queer festival.

We will use irony as the best way to provoke contradictions and liveliness. We will present performance art that is political, as well as will offer theater, performance, labs, visual art, readings, cinema, documentaries and our open lab called Queer Infection. We will do all this with the will to share this experience with those ones who wish to join our festival and contribute to create a free, safe, aware, consensual space. We will do all of this because Queer is, first of all, a search of freedom.

 

they say

 

Eyes Wild Drag brings a Euro sensibility to gender fluidity. These professional gender benders endow their performance with lush sensuality and rich humor. Think Dietrich, Joel Gray, mixed with a little Sophia Loren, and you get an idea of the heady, ironic sexuality they embody. (Curve Magazine, Usa, May 2015)

 

I learned a lot about gender performance in Rome while I was there over the summer with a wonderful group of drag kings and faux queens called Eyes Wild Drag. The event was called the GendErotica Festival and the Femme Conference. It was a really ambitious project and interesting because they’re grappling with femme and whether it can actually be radical to embrace femme or not. I actually think it’s fundamentally radical to embrace femme, and I’ve been trying to articulate this (interview to Fauxnique, AP Magazine, Usa, October 2013)

 

THANK YOU! thanks because you've done a great thing. Political, artistic and cultural. Thanks for your energy, enthusiasm, passion. Thank you because looking at the stage (...), laughing and thinking, I felt myself proud and legitimated as Femme. (...)

Thank you for saying that Femme is subversive. I was been waiting for years. (Carla, Milan, 4th June 2013)

 

GendErotica 2013... three days of intellectual ferment (Tu Style Magazine, 10th June 2013)

 

Eyes Wild Drag not only performs but has created a community (...) an incredibly fabulous way to create a revolution (Curve Magazine, Usa, June 2012)

 

 

EYES WILD DRAG

 

 

Queer gender-drag group of Rome, Italy, after being among the very first promoters of Italian kinging, Eyes Wild Drag are three women in drag bringing an innovative and original style to drag shows in Italy. They work on genders, roles and erotic visionary performances, representing one of the main drag experience led by women in Italy. They have been performing abroad and have completed their first world tour in 2012. They have drawn the attention of many national and international medias (Curve Magazine and Broadway World Usa). Queer activists and performers, they organize drag shows, workshop and events (between a biting crazyness and a magical poetry), promote a queer imaginary of femininity, organize Genderotica. In 2012 they toured the world from from a lot of European countries on to several cities in the US. In 2013 they have been presented at Arte Fiera Verona in the Independent Corner hosted by Cuntemporary (UK).  

 

With their musical/theatrical performances, they realize and purpose a new genre of representation, taking inspiration by typical drag entertainment, but fusioned with other styles, moving between thresholds of Genders, Identities, Eroticism, Power, Shapes and Looks, all connected by a red line of seduction and irony. They love to mix genders as well as show genres.

 

www.eyeswilddrag.it