In Residence: NYC Trans Oral History Project
An image of the sound-editing program Audacity overlaid with a photograph of the Gay Liberation Front’s Demonstration at the Women’s House of Detention in 1969, taken by Diana Davies.
About the residency
At Wendy’s Subway, the NYC Trans Oral History Project will reflect on the role of organizers, historians, and artists as responders both in moments of heightened crisis and throughout the history of movements for trans liberation—especially for Black trans liberation, prison abolition, and resource redistribution. Discussions will revolve around the cultivation of networks of care, mutual aid, and alternative social support systems in organizing, as well as the speculative work of artists and archivists who document contemporary struggle and reflect on past moments in historical time. Throughout the residency, the Project will develop a publication from these conversations, to operate as a history of our present moment and as a resource guide for future movements.
About the NYC Trans Oral History Project
The NYC Trans Oral History Project will be represented by collective members Sebastián Castro Niculescu and Jeanne Vaccaro.
The NYC Trans Oral History Project is a collective, community archive working to document transgender resistance and resilience in New York City. We work to confront the erasure of trans lives and to record diverse histories of gender as intersecting with race and racism, poverty, dis/ability, aging, housing, migration, sexism, and the AIDS crisis. We privilege the insights of vulnerable trans communities fighting the structural dismantling of public benefits, housing insecurity and homelessness, policing, and surveillance.
Sebastián Castro Niculescu is a trans Latina writer, artist, organizer, and performer based in Queens, whose work across media considers the relation of her own marked body to many others, in written and performed meditations on trans embodiment and racialized flesh.
Jeanne Vaccaro is an arts writer, curator, and teacher at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles. Her work explores the textures and felt labor of queer and trans world making.
Both Sebastián and Jeanne work between archival research, curation and performance, and organizing in ways that are deeply concerned with trans survival, history, and artistry.
Support
The Wendy’s Subway Residency Program is made possible through a Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation Art and Social Justice Grant, and through public funds from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, administered in Kings County by the Brooklyn Arts Council.