#Books: Let the World Tremble, Effy's Memoirs

As a preview, we reproduce one of the texts by the “conceptual, performance, and queer feminist artist”—according to her own definition—compiled in a free downloadable e-book: Let the World Tremble: Body and Performance in the Work of Effy Beth. Published by the National University of La Plata Press, it brings together disruptive interventions, images, writings, and perspectives on…

As a preview, we reproduce one of the texts by the “conceptual, performance, and queer feminist artist”—according to her own definition—compiled in a free downloadable e-book: Let the World Tremble: Body and Performance in the Work of Effy Beth . Published by the National University of La Plata Press, the book brings together disruptive interventions, images, writings, and perspectives of the artist who died by suicide at the age of 25 (in 2014), as well as the voices of those who knew her. “There aren’t two genders, there’s only one: your own!” read the sign she carried to her last Pride March. Her prolific and fierce legacy is a visceral testament to that idea. I must have done something. By Effy Beth.   I started hormone therapy the same day I began my studies at the National University Institute of Arts. I’ve placed condoms on public sculptures. I’ve buried my identity like a seed, waiting for it to grow. I’ve organized a human carpet. I’ve draped a hallway with my body. I entered a women’s restroom in leather, like a man. I displayed the costume I use to cross-dress for work. I declared myself a potential threat to your prejudices.   I went to a march against violence against women and denounced on my t-shirt that being a woman doesn’t exempt you from perpetrating violence against me simply for being a woman. I wore all my new clothes and what was left of my old ones, declaring that my clothes are not my sex. I stripped bare my history when I felt threatened. I left the country. More than 600 strangers were the first to see me in a bra. I posed on a bed, inverting the role of the artist, and placed my self-construction at the mercy of others, allowing them to complete or destroy me with their gazes. I extracted half a liter of blood from my body, which I divided into 13 parts to reinterpret my menstrual cycles through actions ranging from swallowing my own blood in a church to using it for hair removal. I forced professors and classmates to bare their torsos so I could enter my hostile vagina, usurped by patriarchal mandates. I downsized the apartment where I lived and invited many people to occupy it to denounce my suffocation. I committed suicide at the university and took an exam while high on a Clonazepam overdose, organizing a funeral complete with a psychiatric morgue. I let others give voice to texts written when I had no voice.   I posed with my childhood doll, playing superheroes. Together with another artist, I intervened in a public walkway, dividing it into lanes exclusively for men and women. I stole art from various artists within the commercial gallery system and forced them to kidnap me and decide the fate of my body. I organized a men's versus women's soccer match, both wearing cleats. I offered my belly as a space for others to tattoo their marked experiences onto me with a pencil. I walked in a corset while the word WHORE was scraped onto my chest; when I removed the corset, I discovered on my belly the scratch that dictated the phrase "YOU'RE NOT BORN THIS WAY."   I retraced the history of all the men who intervened in my body's biography since I began hormone therapy to free myself from them. Alongside a pregnant woman awaiting a son, we declared ourselves two complete women, according to Freud. In a university mezzanine, I shared a bed first with a girl and another day with a boy, problematizing the invisibility of trans lesbianism and the prejudices surrounding it. The sexuality of the man who shares my bed. I paired people up like Cupid, ignoring sex, gender, and sexual orientation. I gave a performance workshop for those who wanted to participate in the Pride March. I walked with the yellow star sewn onto my coat, the one used during the Holocaust to mark Jews, as well as the inverted pink triangle and the black triangle, used to identify homosexuals, antisocial individuals, prostitutes, criminals, feminists, and the mentally ill, among others. I initiated legal proceedings to remove my sex from my official documents. I declared myself the Wandering Jew. I sold fortune cookies, offering an optional kiss with each purchase, and when you opened the cookie, you found the phrase: "Being open-minded isn't just about having an open mind, it's also about letting some things out and others in."   I marched with my penis exposed, threatening at every step to cut it off with garden shears. I set up a pop-up art gallery where I had a retrospective… the gallery went bankrupt. On opening day, I realized that performance art isn't profitable in our country's gallery system. I kidnapped people at a party, handcuffed them, blindfolded them, and left them locked alone in a bathroom for long periods so they could think about what they should do that night to change their answer to a question as simple as, "How satisfied are you with yourself?" As a gift to the first person with HIV I was able to get to know deeply, I cut my arms in front of Congress and covered their back with my blood in a healing embrace.   I wandered lost, selectively confessing that for a year I'd been haunted by the idea of ​​prostituting myself so I could become independent and not have to give up the expensive hormone treatment. I played games with different groups. I posed with my girlfriend—at the time—and we swapped genitals. I published notebooks to fill in the genitalia however you like in different body combinations. I began to provide conceptual advice to artists of all disciplines, from visual artists to musicians and Poets. I drew a comic a day for a month based on situations I experienced daily as a transgender person. I created an alter ego; just as Duchamp created his female version, I created my trans male version by binding my breasts. I made myself visible through my friends and family by putting them in my dress, that emblematic one that divided my family and made me invisible to many. I posed in bed with my partners during the last month I had both a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the same time. I acted in a short film. I danced in front of normalized sexist phrases, I danced before the harsh reality of a country that has not yet decriminalized abortion.   I made a notebook for diverse bodies to be filled in with any genitalia. I edited an online magazine in search of an active reader willing to cultivate divergent thinking. I taught a performance workshop so my students could intervene in the space on the opening day of my comic book exhibition. I edited two found videos from my childhood that show my life before and after the Gulf War. I disfigured my I used my face to make my fingerprints visible, in pursuit of my right to my own identity after so much bureaucratic manipulation. I offered oral sex, a public service to stop silencing situations of violence within familiar environments. I was interviewed for two documentaries, several theses, and various articles and radio programs. I was invited to give talks at teacher and doctor training sessions, and I also participated in several art festivals. I marched in diapers. I am here.   The book can be downloaded for free   here . Photos: Laura Gam, Pamela Arévalo, Nora Lezano (cover) and Effy's personal archives.

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1 comment

  1. Thank you Presentes for continuing to remember Effy and her work! May her struggle, her immense humanity, her concern for visibility, her resistance to discrimination, and her search through different artistic expressions to clarify and shed light on our prejudices endure! Her parents

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