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Adiós al Futuro (ADF) is a multidisciplinary intersex artist from Jalisco, Mexico. She has worked in many areas of art, from lighting, performance, and installation to photography, video, relational art, and object art, focusing on her "life experience as an intersex person and of intersex communities." She is the founder of Proyecto Intersex and the NGO Laboratorio de Narrativas Divergentes (Laboratory of Divergent Narratives). She is also part of the curriculum for the Critical Disability course at 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos (Institute of Critical Studies).

Intersexual Compass, the first Mexican intersex activist organization, defines intersexuality as “a term we use to encompass different bodies in which a person is born with variations in sexual characteristics—that is, born with variations in genital shapes, in the composition of the gonads, in hormone levels or in chromosomal patterns—that do not seem to fit into the typical definitions of man or woman.”

In that sense, intersexuality is not a pathology. It is not a “third gender.” It is not a gender identity, nor a sexual orientation. And there is no single intersex anatomy.

In 2015, Adiós al Futuro created the Intersex Project. In 2019, through collaboration between artists, artivists, and researchers, the NGO Laboratorio de Narrativas Divergentes (Laboratory of Divergent Narratives) , from which various projects have emerged. These projects no longer focus solely on the intersex community but also forge alliances and projects with other communities, such as people with disabilities. Together, they produced the short film Cuerpos disidentes, luchas comunes (Dissident Bodies, Common Struggles) , which counters hate speech against these communities in Mexico and Colombia. Casa Inter (Inter House). 

Casa Inter is a physical space located in Guadalajara, Jalisco. It is the home where the artistic work of Proyecto Intersex is housed. There, the intersex community shares with other populations through meetings, talks, parties, and a film club. 

Along with Brújula Intersexual, Proyecto Intersex are the only two intersex organizations in Mexico.

Presentes spoke with Adiós al Futuro about the importance of dignified representation of intersexuality through art. They discussed how art created by intersex people changes narratives and creates possibilities for community healing, as well as the close connections they forge with communities of people with disabilities. 

– How did your name, Goodbye to the Future, come about?

– Goodbye to the Future was born in 2005 and initially was a collective project. I've always been dedicated to art because, fortunately, my family has always supported me. My parents come from the countryside, from places far removed from art, from the city. Their support has a lot to do with the medical discourse that pathologized me and gave me a very short life expectancy. And that's where the story of Goodbye to the Future begins. I was never able to form a collective, but I started with my individual work. Goodbye to the Future always seemed to me a very provocative name, one that lends itself to multiple meanings. At the beginning, it did relate to this idea that I, too, had bought into from the medical discourse about life expectancy. But it also had to do with the medical idea of ​​normalization, of selling you the idea that if you're "normal," if you're heterosexual, then you're going to be happy. So it has to do with that, with the fact that I'm not interested in that future they sell me. And from there, it has served me to articulate an artistic discourse. In the beginning, I talked about many things, but from 2015 onwards, I focused on talking about my experience as an intersex person. I researched and produced content related to that experience and to intersex communities.

– Why do you speak of intersex “communities”, in the plural?

– There are many intersex communities, they are different, and the intersex experience is very diverse. It's not the same to talk about communities of parents with intersex children as it is to talk about communities of people like me who have survived all the brutality of the medical and social system and who now, although not all of us, are raising our voices, but we are coming together and trying to build community. There are also academics who are not necessarily intersex people but are allies, and for me, they are part of the intersex community.

Today, the acronym for sexual diversity includes the letter 'I' at the end, 'LGBTI,' but Adiós al Futuro (Goodbye to the Future) is critical of this because, even though the letter alluding to intersex people is included, “The LGBTQ+ community doesn't recognize or name our experiences or our demands. And the truth is, we find very few real alliances there. There's a lot of LGBTQ+ activist work and journalists responding to the anniversary and seeking us out in June to talk about each letter of the acronym, but they don't even know that we have our own events in October and November. Ultimately, this is a delicate issue with LGBTQ+ rights and feminism because we're present but not truly present; there's little solidarity with our movement.”

ADF refers to October 26, International Intersex Visibility Day , and November 8, International Intersex Day of Remembrance and Solidarity. 

– Why do dignified representations of intersex people matter, and why is it important to change those representations that continue to place intersex people in a medical and pathologizing perspective?

– Fabian Gimenez Gatto (Uruguayan intersex philosopher) has some wonderful texts on intersex representation and talks about how we come precisely from a totally medicalized figuration, which is also a type of representation absolutely close to pornographic representation, where genitals are totally exposed, they are very graphic images.

November 8th is Intersex Solidarity and Remembrance Day because it's Herculine Barbin's birthday. All we have of Herculine is a single photo of her face that circulates, but there's a wealth of documentation of her genitals and the dissections performed after her suicide, where doctors mutilated her body. It was only after we began to speak out and represent ourselves through art that dignified representations began to emerge, where we weren't reduced to our genitals and didn't talk about illness. We have very little, really. Starting in the 90s, the internet allowed us to connect, and other narratives began to be constructed. And these narratives are also powerful because they stem from a great deal of violence, a great deal of anger, because medical violence is what has marked our entire community. And even if you haven't been medicalized, the world still makes sure to point you out for being different. 

– Besides anger, what other experiences do you communicate in your art today, and how is it represented in the lives of intersex people?

Anger remains a powerful trigger within the community. But several years have passed. For example, in Mexico, we've been working for 10 years. Brújula Intersex started all of this in the country, and it's not the same today to be someone who feels alone and violated as it is to have a community. Although we are artists and dedicate ourselves to that, we have also created mental health spaces for the community. Peer groups, and little by little, through activist work, we are healing because the State and society still have a tremendous debt. And that changes the narratives. Narratives are subject to people's realities. I began producing work based on my intersex experience in 2015.

The first collaborative projects in 2016 had a very fragmented imagery, where you didn't see a single portrait, perhaps just a body part, silhouettes, shadows. And it's been very noticeable how the narratives are changing. This year we launched a collective series called The Intersex Glimpse. In it, intersex people are not only looking directly at the camera but even posing nude. Something that was unthinkable a few years ago. As an artist, I don't invent the narratives; it's my role to accompany these processes within the community. The desire for representation within the community is different now. The medicalized experience is no longer the main focus. There's a desire to show one's own body, to explore it, and to return the gaze. We have to understand that our community has been subjugated through images: photographs, videos of our bodies without consent. Many of us are terrified of images. And much of the artistic process has been about that: confronting the camera not from the medical gaze or the gaze of others, but from our own perspective. From our own perspective, we are changing the narratives and we are healing. 

– Which communities have you found truly listening and showing genuine solidarity?

I definitely identify with the LGBTQ+ community, the population with disabilities. Because the model of disability and intersexuality is very similar, due to pathologization and medical violence; we share a lot. Because at the end of the day, the intersex experience often isn't about gender identity. It's about experiencing a lot of medical violence and social ostracism, just like people with disabilities experience.

– At Casa Inter, what is the reception of the art they share and the films they screen? 

Wow… the intersex experience is so fraught with violence and touches on so many issues that people struggle to watch what we show because it's so violent. What happens regularly at film screenings about our experiences is that when we start the conversation, people are speechless because of what they've just seen. It's always very difficult because, between not knowing we exist and not understanding the brutality of our experiences, it's almost always a shock at first. It's hard to process. 

So it's very difficult to talk about what we want to talk about because of all that ignorance, especially since there's no comprehensive sex education that includes understanding what sex characteristics are. Without those basics, talking about intersexuality is very difficult. 

What we show in the Intersex Project is also closely linked to intersex activism, which is tied to defending the most basic human rights: humanization. We have been dehumanized our entire lives, and we're still here. We've been a global community for almost 30 years, making our voices heard across various sectors, and today there's a lot of information available. There's no longer any excuse to say 'I don't know,' and I think that's also largely a matter of individual responsibility in the face of societal violence and how much we empathize with other groups. 

– What other futures are being built for intersex children and adults?

Even though our rights continue to be violated, even though no one guarantees the rights of intersex children in our countries, at least we now have groups, there is information available, some of us dedicate ourselves to art, others to providing support, others to academia and politics. There are many fronts, and that changes the narratives and makes other futures possible for those children who are being born today and are not being induced because their mothers—because it is almost always the mothers alone—are already protecting the physical integrity of their intersex children. 

There's still a lot of work to be done to prevent this medical violence from happening again. It's like a utopia; who knows if we'll ever achieve it, but the idea is to stop all this violence, especially against the children who are coming up. Much of my motivation is to create healing spaces for the adults who have gone through it because I'm very clear that there's no justice for what we experienced, and that the justice offered by the human rights model is a mockery. That's why, for me, art and Proyecto Intersex are a way of repairing the damage, first for myself and then for my community. And through art, too—telling our stories in our own words—is also a form of justice.