Letter to Vita

This short film consists of a voice-over interpreting a letter written by the author to their younger self. Archive material has been used, mostly from home movies recorded in a Super 8mm film format and adjusted to a 4:3 aspect ratio. In the piece, the images function as decontextualized memories and enhance the physical and mental moments that are named throughout the letter.

The video letter is configured as a vital revision of a trans experience, establishing a dialogue with concepts such as transgender rage and embodiment in relationship to unattainable aesthetic ideals and eating disorders in transmasculine experiences. The entire piece is based on Susan Stryker’s principle of harnessing the emotions emanating from the trans experience, especially anger and rage, to mobilize them into politically effective actions.

The piece also intends to dialogue with the idea of Stryker’s trans monstrosity; Frankenstein, that immortal creature that is reborn in all possible forms and that tempers against the limits of human creation.

Finally, there is a self-referential and meta component in the format of the work itself that relates to the idea of disidentification. The piece is mediated, iterative and citational through resources such as the reading of the letter in voiceover or the use of home movie footage that draw from hybridization and repetition and contribute to this unease process of recycling and rethinking encoded meaning.