—Archive: Drag Models, 2007-ongoing

Photographs + Filing documents

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This archive is presented as a gallery of portraits produced in several European countries and it enables the tracking of the influence of cinema in the representation of alternative masculinities. It creates a collective portrait that shows some preferences in the selection of models of behaviour and aesthetics from a part of the community of persons assigned female at birth who have chosen to re-politicize and/or transgress the limited offer of gender assignment.
The project contrasts reality and fiction by confronting the spaces where the models actually live and the fictional places of film narratives. The portraits are therefore accompanied by images taken in the cities where the participants live when portrayed, spaces that help to construct an alternative narrative. The different persons who collaborated in this work were offered the possibility to explain the reasons why they had made a specific selection, some of them preferring not to talk about their personal choice, and others making an explicit account of their motivatio. In these cases, details are presented on a file card together with the portraits. So far the project has included collaborations from Great Britain, Portugal, Finland, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Germany or Spain, a selection that spans from Port Moresby interpreted by John Malkovich in Bertolucci’s The Sheltered Sky to Riddick, played by Vin Diesel in Pitch Black, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Danny Zucko (John Travolta) in Grease, David Bowie in The Hunger, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise, King Sebastião interpreted by Ricardo Trêpa in O Quinto Império or Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) in Brokeback Mountain.