WEEK 1 / WITH XIOMARA SEBASTIÁN CASTRO NICULESCU︎︎︎︎

How Does It Feel to be Human?

Race, Transness, and the Ends of Performance

SEMINAR LEADER

Photograph by Aelita Parizek

[ IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An artist stands on the cement floor of a gallery lit by bright natural daylight and surrounded by a large Louise Bourgeois bronze sculpture of a spider. We see her from the waist up. She is a light-skinned Latina trans woman, with a messy bun of black hair peeking out behind her head, and bleached tendrils of hair framing her face. She looks directly at the photographer through frameless eyeglasses and a black surgical face mask. She has several black and grey tattoos on both of her arms and wears a black, button up dress with spaghetti straps, as well as large gold hoop earrings and a thin gold chain around her neck. An old, brick exposed wall with a window is in the background, revealing a bright white light from outside. ︎︎ heart symbol ]

Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu is a trans Latina writer, artist, and organizer from New York, by way of Ecuador and Romania. Her work considers the relation of her marked body to many others, through fleshiness, leaks, abjection, and other corporeal stagings beyond the hold of respectability. In her critical writing, she seeks to offer a “trans of color critique” through embodied strategies in performance work by racialized trans women artists from the 1970s to the present. Her performance work is reviewed in Artforum, and her edited book on personal ads is forthcoming from Pink Jacket press. She co-organizes the NYC Trans Oral History Project.

Icon showing open books with fanned paged drawn in purple lines." alt="Icon showing open books with fanned paged drawn in purple lines.

[ IMAGE DESCRIPTION: purple line illustration of open book. ︎ heart symbol ]

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How Does It Feel to be Human?

Race, Transness, and the Ends of Performance

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How Does It Feel to be Human?

Race, Transness, and the Ends of Performance

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