Misplaced Trans History

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Thursday, 21 November 2019 - 7pm
Place
Sabatini Building, Vaults Gallery
With the support of:

Embassy of Argentina in Spain

Inside the framework of:

We Speak for Our Difference. LGTBIQ+ Programme and Objectors. Feminisms in the Museo

Force line:

Action and radical imagination

Organized by
Museo Reina Sofía

In conjunction with the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held annually to remember those who have been killed through transphobia, hate and fear, the Museo Reina Sofía will organise an encounter to present the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Archive of Trans Memory, AMT), an alternative cartography created with a view to repositioning hidden and silenced historical documentation as it questions the politics of visibility.    

The origin of this archive hails from the figures of María Belén Correa and Claudia Pía Baudracco, trans activist women and the founders, in 1933, of ATA (the Association of Argentinian Transvestites). Both longed for a space in which to gather surviving companions, and their memories and images, in the hope of preserving the memory of bodies that suffered police violence or were abandoned or punished by the Argentinian State in power until the early 1990s. After Claudia Pía Baudracco passed away in 2012 — just months before the Gender Identity Law in Argentina was passed — María Belén Correa, from exile, established the AMT archive. It started out as a virtual space from which to share anecdotes, photos, testimonies, letters and police reports of the transvestite, transgender and transsexual community in Argentina; materials which demonstrate how, over a long period of time, there were lives erased, family photographs hidden, and laws and edicts systematically penalising and hounding trans identities.  

In 2014, with the collaboration of Argentinian photographer Cecilia Estalles, work got under way to assemble and digitally preserve this documentation to ensure its conservation and protection. At present, AMT comprises 9,000 images spanning the early 20th century to the end of the 1990s, including photographic, filmic, sound, and journalistic memories, and different museum pieces, for instance ID documents, passports, letters, notes, police records, magazine articles, personal diaries, objects and clothes. Ultimately, the archive constitutes an historical, political and collective construction of this trans/transvestite community by the few survivors.   

Currently, those involved in the project include María Belén Correa, Cecilia Estalles, Carlos Ibarra, Ana Laura Masiello, Magalí Muñiz, Lucila Penedo, Carla Pericles, Mels Petroff, Cecilia Saurí, and Ornella Vega

Participants: María Belén Correa, Cecilia Estalles, Magalí Muñiz and Carla Pericles (representatives of the Trans Memory Archive).