Today the Barcelona LGBTI centre is launching a new programme of activities entitled “Our Bodies are Battlegrounds”, that will run from February to April 2023
The Barcelona LGBTI Centre presents the programme “Els nostres cossos són camps de batalla”[Our Bodies are Battlegrounds], with a schedule of activities that will run from February to April 2023. The aim is to understand the body as a political project, a battleground where the way norms and values are defined is at stake.
The title refers to the slogan included in the work of US artist Barbara Kruger, “Your body is a battleground”, created in the 90s following the feminist demonstrations in protest against restrictive anti-abortion laws, demanding the right to decide what happens to women’s own bodies.
These demands, together with those for LGBTIQA+ liberation, have served as an inspiration for a programme that draws on activism, self-organised forms of resistance and street-level struggles.
The aim is also to serve as a reminder of the concept of the body as a collective subject, as a continuum of interdependent bodies that form a common territory, but one that is in dispute with the powers that be.
This programme seeks to address and understand the regulatory norms and power relations that pervade bodies, and to raise questions about their sexualisation and the construction of gender, desire and sexual and affective practices. It involves an analysis of norms in order to imagine how they might be subverted.
This new programme of activities, which will run from February to April, will provide spaces for the exchange of ideas, reflections and feelings on issues that affect the body, making explicit the forms of violence suffered and the tools for building collective resilience, as well as talking about pleasure, desire and the emotions experienced and shared.
All the activities are free of charge, will take place at the Barcelona LGBTI Centre at C. Comte Borrell 22, and are open to all until capacity is reached.
The guided tour will run through the streets of the El Born, El Gòtic and El Raval neighbourhoods of Barcelona, and to take part you’ll need to book your place by sending an email to inscripciones@centrelgtbibcn.org.
Take a look at what we have planned:
Entranyes [Entrails]
As if they were organs of the human body as territory, there beats a nerve centre inside each of the three ‘cavities’ of the exhibition space at the LGBTI Centre.
The first is directly in dispute with structures that can become oppressive, such as race, gender, property and the family.
The second takes a different approach: conspiring, appealing, and announcing other possible futures.
And the third embodies ideas that challenge the categories of scientific discourse on what it is to be human, bringing back to us the detritus of its fissures and ruptures.
From a transfeminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial perspective, this exhibition is an attempt to go deep down, to the root, to the bone. With works in different languages and formats, on the one hand the aim is to make visible the frontiers that delimit worlds that coexist alongside each other, and on the other to suggest possible ways of crossing them.
Activity
Exhibition: “Entranyes”
Curated and proposed by: H Lukas, Ju Salgueiro, Mar Fabbri, and Tau Luna Acosta.
Invited artists, researchers and activists: Bruna Kury, Efe Ce Ele, iki yos piña narváez, Imagem Ensayo, Isaac Ernesto, Linda Porn, Mavi Veloso, Muerte a La Norma, Quimera Rosa, Sami Wasi and Manu Martín Pahde.
Special thanks to: Julia Pardo and Xeito Fole.
Time: From 6 February to 29 April. Admission is free during the Centre’s opening hours
Presentation: 6 February
TIME: 6 pm
VENUE: Barcelona LGBTI Centre, C. Comte Borrell, 22
La memòria deixa empremtes als carrers [Memory Leaves its Mark on the Streets]
This activity invites you to take a historical walk through the squares and streets of Barcelona that have been areas frequented by trans women sex workers for centuries. Guided by the theatre group Tirititranstranstrans, you’ll learn about how they helped to shape these neighbourhoods, and how they organised resistance and fought for their rights, battles which still continue today.
Activity
Guided tour: “La putibarcelona trans*”, with Violet Ferrer de Tirititranstranstrans
DAYS: 18 February, 18 March i 15 April
TIME: from 11 am to 1 pm
Register by emailing inscripcions@centrelgtbibcn.org. The number of available places is very limited.
Start: Rambla del Born, 32
End: Rambla dels Caputxins by C. Nou de la Rambla
Encarnem la possibilitat de resistir [We’re the Embodiment of the Possibility of Resistance]
Over the course of the next few months, we want to meet to talk about books that open up imaginaries and present us with testimonies of violence, and also of all the possible forms of resistance.
Activity
Conversation based on the book “La rebelión de las hienas. Relatos corporales de personas intersex” [The Rebellion of the Hyenas. Bodily Tales of Intersex People]
DAY: 16 February
TIME: 6 pm
VENUE: Barcelona LGBTI Centre, C. Comte Borrell, 22
Activity
Conversation based on the book “Cuando el Estado es violento. Narrativas de violencias contra las mujeres y disidencias sexuales” [When the State is Violent. Narratives of Violence Against Women and Sexual Dissidence]
DAY: 27 April
TIME: 6 pm
VENUE: Barcelona LGBTI Centre, C. Comte Borrell, 22
Del tacte a les tàctiques [From Tact to Tactics]
We want to have a critical debate on the mechanisms of control, discipline and the exclusion of bodies, and also on the tactics that activisms and dissidence have deployed in terms of resistance, from a perspective of combative joy, affection and care.
Activity
Round table: Algorithms, violence and digital health
Social networks are often conceptualised as spaces of freedom, within which all are invited to express themselves. Although they have been, and still are, platforms that facilitate the articulation of struggles, they can also become traps where anonymity is used to permit forms of hatred, harassment, blackmail and abuse against dissident identities to flourish.
We are opening up a space where we can appropriate these tools and use them to subvert their unfair norms, reinventing them in order to find spaces within them that can serve as a shelter and refuge where people can find community and build a real network.
DAY: 16 March
TIME: 6 pm
VENUE: Barcelona LGBTI Centre, C. Comte Borrell, 22
Activity
Round table: Trans identities*: rights, laws and struggles
The last year has been marked by the struggle for the approval of the so-called trans law* in the Spanish Parliament. Meetings, assemblies, drafts, negotiations, proposals, cutbacks, demonstrations, appeals, needs and demands have all helped to lay out the path the path towards the parliamentary debate.
But what advances does this law represent? What limitations or shortcoming are there in the text? Which identities have remained on the margins of the law? What role do activisms and self-organised struggles play in the defence of trans* rights, outside the institutions?
We are sharing journeys that take different facets of the same struggle as their starting point.
DAY: 30 March
TIME: 6 pm
VENUE: Barcelona LGBTI Centre, C. Comte Borrell, 22
Activity
Round table: Pleasure, desire and sexuality in bodies with functional diversity
Often, bodies conceived as non-disabled are infantilised and seen as de-sexualised and de-eroticised. If visions of sexuality are limited to its productive and reproductive aspects, and the direction of desire and pleasure are framed solely in relation to certain bodies, bodies that are presented as the only ones that deserve to be desired, then many people are excluded.
In this conversation, we want to talk about forms of pleasure and desire that broaden our horizons and challenge us to rethink our own notion of sexuality.
DAY: 20 April
TIME: 6 pm
VENUE: Barcelona LGBTI Centre, C. Comte Borrell, 22
