Belly-up Dream (Dog or Fish?) | Movie screening and discussion

16 May at 7 pm. the Lithuanian premiere of Paul B. Preciado's Orlando, My Political Biography (France, 2023, 98 min.) will take place at the Kaunas Artists' House in the programme of the project "Belly-up Dream (dog or fish?)".

"Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."

Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando: My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto which premiered and took home four prizes at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero/heroine has inspired readers for their gender fluidity across physical and spiritual metamorphoses over a 300-year lifetime. Preciado casts a diverse cross-section of more than twenty trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Orlando as they perform interpretations of scenes from the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of identity and transition. Not content to simply update a seminal work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of Orlando in the continuing struggle against anti-trans ideologies and in the fight for global trans rights.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with:

Teo Ala-Ruona is a Helsinki-based performance artist whose work focuses on somatospeculative fictioning. Ala-Ruona explores themes such as techno-trans-masculinity, sexuality, ecology, and toxicity through a combination of theoretical discourse, autobiographical text material, and psychologically and physically intense performance scores.

Saša Kochan is an artist, visually contributing to various queer causes and a member of the association "Trans Autonomija". He is currently interested in and observing how the social and political environment can push queer (and especially trans) people to look for other realities and other, perhaps not quite human, bodies for self-representation.

The discussion will be held in English.

The event is free of charge.

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Curator of the discursive programme: Edvinas Grinkevičius
Visual graphics: Kornelija Zizaitė

The event is part of the project "Belly-up Dream (Dog or Fish?)". The project is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.