“Corporalitats” is a new programme of activities starting at the Barcelona LGBTI Centre on 7 February and focusing on bodily diversity. Over the months of February, March and April, the programme offers a series of activities to explore bodily diversity, in all its joy and resilience. The cycle is a call to change and broaden conceptual frameworks, often highly restrictive, which impose ideas about what bodies should be like.
The cycle opens with the exhibition Les corps incorruptibles, by the photographer Emilie Hallard, whose images seek to offer a declaration of feminist, queer and anti-racist love for diversity, improbability, ambiguousness, the androgynous, the non-obvious and the non-binary.
Hallard will also be offering guided tours of the exhibition (17 February, 11 March and 21 April), where she will be explaining her creative process and taking part in a round table session on “The heteronormative body and other racist and ableist tales”(10 February).
Together with the photos, the exhibition space at the centre will be screening short videos of the documentary Famílies Trans*, by Mar Llop, with the voices of thirty families who are socialising their children according to the gender they feel.
In terms of literary presentations, February comes loaded with two big events: the presentations of TRANS. Un alegato por un mundo más justo y más libre, de Shon Faye (22 de febrer) i deHuaco retrato, by Gabriela Wiener (24 February), with the authors taking part virtually.
On 24 March, Laura Fernández will be presenting her book Hacia mundos más animales, which offers a dialogue on different fronts of oppression such as speciesism, sexism, heteronormativity, racism, ableism and environmental exploitation.
The round table sessions will be discussing body hair or its absence (16 February, with Bel Olid i membres de les associacions A pelo! i Som Barbàrie), i sobre la construcció del desig en base a la intersecció d’eixos com la discapacitat, la grassor o el gènere amb diferents corporalitats (12 d’abril, amb la presentació d’una investigació de Pal Gallego Barreales).
The centre continues to organise participatory activities, with a drag workshop (3 March, with Licorka Fey) a la il·lustració que contempla la diversitat corporal (5 i 7 d’abril, amb Arte Mapache), passant pel club de lectura sobre els llibres Borderlands/La Frontera de Gloria Anzaldúa i el clàssic de literatura lèsbica Stone Butch Blues de Leslie Feinberg (23 de febrer i 23 de març, amb Iki Yos Piña) o la jam de poesia amb temàtica centrada en els cossos (29 d’abril, amb ExpresArte).
Away from its premises, the LGBTI Centre is organising rutes històriques per la memòria i la repressió de les persones LGTBI (12 de febrer, 12 de març i 9 d’abril), que van suposar un èxit de públic en l’anterior cicle de programació, i es fa present a les funcions de l’obra Ocaña, Reina de las Ramblas, taking part in a discussion on the figure of the artist after the function on 1 March.
The cultural and participatory activities of the Barcelona LGBTI Centre are free and open to all. They represent the municipal facility’s work to raise public awareness and prevent and combat LGBTI-phobia and hate discourse and attacks.